Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman and philanthropist.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York to psychiatrist Karen (Kempner) and dentist Edward Zuckerberg.

He and his three sisters (Arielle, Randi, and Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

His great-grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland.

Zuckerberg initially attended Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy.

He was captain of the fencing team.

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school.

In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with each other.

During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player.

The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.

The New Yorker once said of Zuckerberg: "some kids played computer games. Mark created them."

While still in high school, he attended Mercy College taking a graduate computer course on Thursday evenings.

The New Yorker noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy".

He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House.

In his second year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and help them form study groups.

Later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos.

Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, explained:

"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."

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 preventing 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".

An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002.

He co-founded the social media service Facebook, along with his Harvard roommates in 2004, and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder.

Zuckerberg briefly attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website.

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, in partnership with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

In 2007, at age 23, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire at the time.

He has since used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Time named Zuckerberg one of the most influential people in the world in 2008, 2011, 2016 and 2019, and nominated him as a finalist several other times.

He was named the Time Person of the Year in 2010, the same year when Facebook eclipsed more than half a billion users.

A film depicting Zuckerberg's early career, legal troubles and initial success with Facebook, The Social Network, was released in 2010 and won multiple Academy Awards.

Zuckerberg's prominence and fast rise in the technology industry has prompted political and legal attention.

The founding of Facebook involved Zuckerberg in multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues of user privacy.

Originally launched in only select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users in 2012.

Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares.

In 2013, he co-founded the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us.

In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked tenth on the Forbes list of the World's Most Powerful People.

In the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans in 2023, he was ranked eighth with a personal wealth of $106 billion.

, Zuckerberg's net worth was estimated at $178 billion by Forbes, making him the fourth richest person in the world.

On April 10 and 11, 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding the usage of personal data by Facebook in relation to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.