Mark Zuckerberg
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
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Mark Zuckerberg
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 Zuckerberg at the 37th G8 summit in 2011. |
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Born
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Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
May 14, 1984 (age 28)[1] White Plains, New York, U.S. |
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Residence
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Nationality
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Occupation
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Chairman & CEO of Facebook, Inc.
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Years active
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2004–present
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Known for
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Co-founding Facebook in 2004;
world's 2nd youngest self-made billionaire (2012)[3] |
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Net worth
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US$ 9.4 billion (2012)[4]
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Spouse(s)
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Priscilla Chan (m. 2012)
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Relatives
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Randi, Donna
and Arielle
(sisters) |
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Awards
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TIME Person of the
Year 2010
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Website
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Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984)
is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur.
He is best known as one of five co-founders of the social networking
siteFacebook. Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief
executive of Facebook, Inc.[5][6]
Born and raised in New York state, he took up
writing software programs as a hobby in middle school, beginning with BASIC,
with help from his father and a tutor (who called him a "prodigy").
In high school, he excelled in classic literature and fencing while studying at Phillips Exeter
Academy.
He later attended Harvard University,
majoring in computer science and psychology. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program called Facemash as a "fun" project,
letting students on the college's network vote on other students' photo
attractiveness. It was shut down within days, but would become a template for
his writing Facebook, a program he launched from his dormitory room. With the
help of friends, he took Facebook to other campuses nationwide and soon after
moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2007, Zuckerberg was a billionaire at the
age of 23.[7] By 2010, Facebook had an
estimated 500 million users worldwide. Zuckerberg has since been involved in
various legal disputes initiated by others who have claimed a share of the
company's profits due to their help in setting it up.
Since 2010, Zuckerberg has been named among
the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world by Time magazine's Person of the Year.[8][9][10] In 2010 a fictionalized
account of Zuckerberg creating Facebook while in college and its later start-up
phase was made into a movie dramatization, The Social Network.
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Contents
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3 Career
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Early
life
Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in White Plains,
New York.[11] He is the son of Karen (née
Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist.[12] He and his three sisters,
Randi, Donna, and Arielle,[2] were brought up in Dobbs Ferry,
New York.[2] Zuckerberg was raised Jewish,
had his bar mitzvah when
he turned thirteen,[13][14] and has since described
himself as anatheist.[14][15][16][17]
At Ardsley High School,
Zuckerberg had excelled in the classics before transferring to Phillips Exeter
Academy in his junior year, where he won prizes in science
(math, astronomy and physics) and classical studies (on his college
application, Zuckerberg listed the following non-English languages that he
could read and write: French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek) and was a
fencing star and captain of the fencing team.[16][18][19][20] In college, he was known for
reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.[18]
Software
developer
Early
years
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing
software as a child in middle school. His
father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later
hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him
a "prodigy", adding that it was "tough to stay ahead of
him". Zuckerberg also took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near
his home while he was still in high school. He enjoyed developing computer
programs, especially communication tools and games. In one such program, since
his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software
program he called "ZuckNet", which allowed all the computers between
the house and dental office to communicate by pinging each other. It is
considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the
following year.[2]
According to writer Jose Antonio Vargas,
"some kids played computer games. Mark created them." Zuckerberg
himself recalls this period: "I had a bunch of friends who were artists.
They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." However,
notes Vargas, Zuckerberg was not a typical "geek-klutz", as he later
became captain of his prep school fencing team and earned a classics
diploma. Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that
Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff",
recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.[2]
During Zuckerberg's high school years, under
the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the
Synapse Media Player that used artificial
intelligence to learn the user's listening habits, which was
posted toSlashdot[21] and received a rating of 3 out
of 5 from PC Magazine.[22] Microsoft and AOL tried
to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard University in
September 2002.
College
years
By the time he began classes at Harvard, he
had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy", notes
Vargas. He studied psychology and computer science as well as belonging to Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity.[2][5][8][23] In his sophomore year, he
wrote a program he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class
selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help
them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he
initially called Facemash that let
students select the best looking person from a choice of photos. According to
Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, Arie Hasit, "he built the site for
fun". Hasit explains:
We had books called Face
Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the
student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures, or pictures
of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was
"hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking.[24]
The site went up over a weekend, but by
Monday morning the college shut it down because its popularity had overwhelmed
one of Harvard's network switches and
prevented students from accessing the Internet. In addition, many students
complained that their photos were being used without permission. Zuckerberg
apologized publicly, and the student paper ran articles stating that his site
was "completely improper".[24]
Around the time of Facemash, however,
students were requesting that the university develop an internal website that
would include similar photos and contact details. According to Hasit,
"Mark heard these pleas and decided that if the university won't do
something about it, he will, and he would build a site that would be even
better than what the university had planned."[24]
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his
sophomore year to complete his project.[25]
Career
Zuckerberg listening to
President Barack H. Obama before
a private meeting where Obama dined with technology business leaders in Woodside,
California, February 17, 2011. (Also pictured, from left: Carol Bartz of Yahoo!, Art Levinson of Genentech,Steve Westly of The Westly Group, and Eric Schmidt of Google.)
Facebook
Main articles: Facebook, History of Facebook,
and Timeline of Facebook
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard
dormitory room on February 4, 2004.[26][27] An earlier inspiration for
Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter
Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It
published its own student directory, “The Photo Address Book,” which students
referred to as “The Facebook.” Such photo directories were an important part of
the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were
able to list attributes such as their class years, their proximities to
friends, and their telephone numbers.[26]
Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook
started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to
spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first started it at Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, New York University, Cornell, Penn, Brown, and Yale, and then at other schools that had
social contacts with Harvard.[28][29][30][31] Samyr Laine, atriple jumper representing Haiti at
the 2012 Summer Olympics,
shared a room with Zuckerberg during Facebook's founding. "Mark was
clearly on to great things," said Laine, who was Facebook's fourteenth
user.[32]
Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California,
with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house that served as an
office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company.
They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group
planned to return to Harvard but eventually decided to remain in California.[33][34] They had already turned down
offers by major corporations to buy out Facebook. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg
explained his reasoning:
It's not because of the
amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we
create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned byconglomerates is
just not an attractive idea to me.[27]
He restated these same goals to Wired magazine
in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world
open."[35] Earlier, in April 2009,
Zuckerberg sought the advice of former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing strategies
for Facebook.[36]
On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that
the company reached the 500 million-user mark.[37] When asked whether Facebook
could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth,
he explained:
I guess we could ... If you
look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query.
The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the
average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... That’s the
simplest thing we could do. But we aren’t like that. We make enough money.
Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we
want to.[35]
In 2010, Steven Levy, who authored the 1984 book Hackers:
Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg
"clearly thinks of himself as a hacker".[38] Zuckerberg said that
"it's OK to break things" "to make them better".[38][39] Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to eight weeks
where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project.[38] The company provided music,
food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including
Zuckerberg, regularly attended.[39] "The idea is that you can
build something really good in a night", Zuckerberg told Levy. "And
that's part of the personality of Facebook now ... It's definitely very core to
my personality."[38]
Vanity Fair magazine named
Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential
people of the Information Age".[40] Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on
the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009.[41] In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen
as number 16 in New Statesman's
annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.[42]
In a 2011 interview with PBS after
the death of Steve Jobs,
Zuckerberg said that Jobs had advised him on how to create a management team at
Facebook that was "focused on building as high quality and good things as
you are".[43]
On October 1, 2012, Zuckerberg visited
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media
innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook’s position in the Russian market.[44] Russia's communications
minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged the social media
giant's founder to abandon plans to lure away Russian programmers and instead
consider opening a research center in Moscow. Facebook has roughly 9 million
users in Russia, while domestic clone VK has around 34 million.[45]
Wirehog
Main article: Wirehog
A month after Facebook launched in February
2004, i2hub, another campus-only service, created by Wayne Chang, was launched. i2hub focused on peer-to-peer file sharing. At the time,
both i2hub and Facebook were gaining the attention of the press and growing
rapidly in users and publicity. In August 2004, Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D'Angelo, and Sean Parker launched a competing
peer-to-peer file sharing service called Wirehog, a precursor toFacebook Platform applications.[46][47]
Platform
and Beacon
Zuckerberg at World Economic Forum,Davos, Switzerland (January
2009)
On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Platform, a development platform for
programmers to create social applications within Facebook. Within weeks, many
applications had been built and some already had millions of users. It grew to
more than 800,000 developers around the world building applications for
Facebook Platform.
On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a
new social advertising system called Beacon, which enabled people to share
information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on
other sites. For example, eBay sellers could let
friends know automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed
as they list items for sale. The program came under scrutiny because of privacy
concerns from groups and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to
respond to the concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg wrote a
blog post on Facebook[48] taking responsibility for the
concerns about Beacon and offering an easier way for users to opt out of the
service.
In 2007, Zuckerberg was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as
one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[49]
On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook
Platform for users.
Legal
controversies
Main article: Criticism of Facebook
ConnectU
lawsuits
Main article: ConnectU
Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of
intentionally making them believe he would help them build a social network
called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU).[50] They filed a lawsuit in 2004
but it was dismissed on a technicality on March 28, 2007. It was refiled soon
thereafter in federal court in Boston. Facebook counter sued in regards to Social
Butterfly, a project put out by The Winklevoss
Chang Group, an alleged partnership between ConnectU and i2hub.
On June 25, 2008, the case settled and Facebook agreed to transfer over
1.2 million common shares and pay $20 million in cash.[51]
In November 2007, confidential court
documents were posted on the website of 02138,
a magazine that catered to Harvard alumni. They included Zuckerberg's social
security number, his parents' home address, and his girlfriend's address.
Facebook filed to have the documents removed, but the judge ruled in favor of 02138.[52]
Saverin
lawsuit
A lawsuit filed by Eduardo Saverin against Facebook and
Zuckerberg was settled out of court. Though terms of the settlement were
sealed, the company affirmed Saverin's title as co-founder of Facebook. Saverin
signed a non-disclosure contract after the settlement.[53][54]
Pakistan
criminal investigation
In June 2010, Pakistani Deputy Attorney General
Muhammad Azhar Sidiqque launched a criminal investigation into Zuckerberg and
Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes after a "Draw Muhammad"
contest was hosted on Facebook. The investigation also named the anonymous
German woman who created the contest. Sidiqque asked the country's police to
contact Interpol to have Zuckerberg and the three
others arrested for blasphemy. On May
19, 2010, Facebook's website was temporarily blocked in Pakistan until Facebook
removed the contest from its website at the end of May. Sidiqque also asked its
UN representative to raise the issue with the United
Nations General Assembly.[55][56]
Paul
Ceglia
Main article: Paul Ceglia
On June 30, 2010, Paul Ceglia, the owner of a wood pellet fuel company in Allegany County,
upstate New York, filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, claiming 84%
ownership of Facebook and seeking monetary damages. According to Ceglia, he and
Zuckerberg signed a contract on April 28, 2003, that an initial fee of $1,000
entitled Ceglia to 50% of the website's revenue, as well as an additional 1%
interest in the business per day after January 1, 2004, until website
completion. Zuckerberg was developing other projects at the time, among which
was Facemash, the predecessor of Facebook, but did not register the
domain name thefacebook.com until January 1, 2004. Facebook
management dismissed the lawsuit as "completely frivolous". Facebook
spokesman Barry Schnitt told a reporter that Ceglia's counsel had
unsuccessfully sought an out-of-court settlement.[57]
Pursuant to the contract, Ceglia agreed to
pay Zuckerberg $1,000 for StreetFax and $1,000 for PageBook. The contract also
refers to The Face Book, a project that was to be completed by January 2004.
Ceglia offered a receipt for $1,000, dated six months after the contract, to
prove he paid Zuckerberg, but it was not the full amount due, and the contract
did not specify what occurs in the event of a default.[58]
In an interview with ABC World News, Zuckerberg stated he was
confident he had never signed such an agreement. At the time, Zuckerberg worked
for Ceglia as a code developer on a project named "StreetFax". Judge
Thomas Brown issued a restraining order on all financial
transfers concerning ownership of Facebook until further notice; in response,
Facebook removed the
case to federal court and
asked that the state court injunction be dissolved. According to Facebook, the
injunction would not affect their business and lacked any legal basis.[59][60][61][62][63][64]
Depictions
in media
The
Social Network
Main article: The Social Network
A movie based on Zuckerberg and the founding
years of Facebook, The Social Network was
released on October 1, 2010, and stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. After
Zuckerberg was told about the film, he responded, "I just wished that
nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive."[65] Also, after the film's script was
leaked on the Internet and it was apparent that the film would not portray
Zuckerberg in a wholly positive light, he stated that he wanted to establish
himself as a "good guy".[66] The film is based on the book The Accidental
Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which the book's publicist once
described as "big juicy fun" rather than "reportage".[67] The film's screenwriter Aaron Sorkintold New York magazine, "I don't want my fidelity to be
to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling", adding, "What is the
big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy's sake, and can we not have the
true be the enemy of the good?"[68]
Upon winning the Golden Globes award for Best Picture on
January 16, 2011, producer Scott Rudin thanked Facebook and
Zuckerberg "for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story
about communication and the way we relate to each other.”[69] Sorkin, who won for Best
Screenplay, retracted some of the impressions given in his script:[70]
"I wanted to say to Mark Zuckerberg
tonight, if you're watching, Rooney Mara's character makes a prediction at
the beginning of the movie. She was wrong. You turned out to be a great
entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist."
On January 29, 2011, Zuckerberg made a
surprise guest appearance on Saturday Night Live,
which was being hosted by Jesse Eisenberg. They both said it was the first time
they ever met.[71] Eisenberg asked Zuckerberg,
who had been critical of his portrayal by the film, what he thought of the
movie. Zuckerberg replied, "It was interesting."[72] In a subsequent interview
about their meeting, Eisenberg explains that he was "nervous to meet him,
because I had spent now, a year and a half thinking about him ..." He
adds, "Mark has been so gracious about something that’s really so
uncomfortable ... The fact that he would do SNL and make
fun of the situation is so sweet and so generous. It’s the best possible way to
handle something that, I think, could otherwise be very uncomfortable."[73][74]
Disputed accuracy
Jeff Jarvis, author of the book Public
Parts, interviewed Zuckerberg and believes Sorkin has made too much of the
story up. He states, "That's what the internet is accused of doing, making
stuff up, not caring about the facts."[75]
According to David Kirkpatrick, former
technology editor at Fortune magazine
and author of The Facebook Effect:The Inside Story of the Company That
Is Connecting the World, (2011),[76] "the film is only
"40% true ... he is not snide and sarcastic in a cruel way, the way
Zuckerberg is played in the movie." He says that "a lot of the
factual incidents are accurate, but many are distorted and the overall
impression is false", and concludes that primarily "his motivations
were to try and come up with a new way to share information on the
internet".[75]
Although the film portrays Zuckerberg's
creation of Facebook in order to elevate his stature after not getting into any
of the elite final clubs at
Harvard, Zuckerberg himself said he had no interest in joining the final clubs.[2] Kirkpatrick agrees that the
impression implied by the film is "false".[75]
Karel Baloun, a former senior engineer at
Facebook, notes that the "image of Zuckerberg as a socially inept nerd is
overstated ... It is fiction ..." He likewise dismisses the
film's assertion that he "would deliberately betray a friend".[75]
Other depictions
Zuckerberg voiced himself on an episode of The Simpsons, "Loan-a Lisa", which first aired on
October 3, 2010. In the episode, Lisa Simpson and her friend Nelson encounter
Zuckerberg at an entrepreneurs' convention. Zuckerberg tells Lisa that she does
not need to graduate from college to be wildly successful, referencing Bill Gates and Richard Branson as examples.[77]
On October 9, 2010, Saturday Night Live lampooned
Zuckerberg and Facebook.[78] Andy Samberg played Zuckerberg. The real
Zuckerberg was reported to have been amused: "I thought this was
funny."[79]
Stephen Colbert awarded a "Medal of
Fear" to Zuckerberg at the Rally
to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30, 2010,
"because he values his privacy much more than he values yours".[80]
Use
of other social networks
Zuckerberg created an account with Google+
soon after the social network was unveiled, saying he sees it as a
"validation for his vision" of online social networking.[81] By July 2011, Zuckerberg had
become the most followed user on Google+, outranking Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.[82] As of March 6, 2012, his
ranking has dropped to 184 on the service, behind Page and Brin.[83] His public profile is minimal
with one photo and a bio that reads "I make things".[84]
Zuckerberg has maintained a private account
on Twitter under the username "zuck", though in 2009 he revealed that
the public account "finkd" also belonged to him.[85]
Philanthropy
Zuckerberg donated an undisclosed amount to Diaspora, an
open-source personal web server that implements a distributed social networking
service. He called it a "cool idea".[35]
Zuckerberg founded the Start-up: Education
foundation.[86][87] On September 22, 2010, it was
reported that Zuckerberg had arranged to donate $100 million to Newark Public Schools,
the public school system of Newark, New
Jersey.[88][89] Critics noted the timing of
the donation as being close to the release of The Social Network,
which painted a somewhat negative portrait of Zuckerberg.[90][91] Zuckerberg responded to the
criticism, saying, "The thing that I was most sensitive about with the
movie timing was, I didn’t want the press about The Social Network movie
to get conflated with the Newark project. I was thinking about doing this
anonymously just so that the two things could be kept separate."[90] Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker stated that he and New
Jersey Governor Chris Christie had
to convince Zuckerberg's team not to make the donation anonymously.[90]
On December 9, 2010, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed a promise they called
the "Giving Pledge",
in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their wealth over
the course of time, and invited others among the wealthy to donate 50% or more
of their wealth to charity.[92][93][94]
Personal
life
At a party put on by his fraternity during
his sophomore year, Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, a fellow student who he
began dating in 2003. Chan is the child of a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee, who arrived in the U.S. after the Fall of Saigon,[95] was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, and is a
2003 graduate of Quincy
High School.[96][97] In September 2010, Zuckerberg
invited Chan, by then a medical student at the University
of California, San Francisco,[98] to move into his rented Palo
Alto house.[2][99] Zuckerberg studied Mandarin Chinese in preparation for the
couple's visit to the People's Republic of China in December 2010.[100][101]
On May 19, 2012, Zuckerberg and Chan married
in Zuckerberg's backyard in a celebration also marking her graduation from
medical school.[102][103][104] Chan has a medical degree,
and, according to some sources, is planning to begin interning and residencing
towards becoming a pediatrician in 2012 or is a pediatrician currently.[105][106][105][106]
On Zuckerberg's Facebook page, he listed his
personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect
and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow,
minimalism".[107] Zuckerberg sees blue best
because of red–green
colorblindness; blue is also Facebook's dominant color.[108]
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