Over time, Zuckerberg enlisted a few of his fellow students to help grow the website. Eduardo Saverin, for example, worked on the business end while Dustin Moskovitz was brought on as a programmer. Andrew McCollum served as the site’s graphic artist and Chris Hughes became the de facto spokesperson. Together the team who invented facebook expanded the site to additional universities and colleges. The exact source of the idea for Facebook is the subject of much controversy. First, he started FaceMash as a site for students to rate the attractiveness of fellow students.
Mark and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a sleepy, well-to-do town on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a San Francisco-based independent research center that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years. In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity. “With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts,” he said.
Facebook IPO and Acquisitions
- He co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder.
- Microsoft and AOL were interested in purchasing the software and hiring Zuckerberg even before he graduated high school but he turned down all offers.
- His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple’s four children — Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.
- Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook.
Next, he worked with other students on Harvard Connection, a personal directory for Harvard students. Zuckerberg began using and programming computers in middle school, with the active support of his father. Edward taught the 11-year-old Mark Atari BASIC, and then hired a software developer David Newman to give his son private lessons.
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s IQ? Is He the Smartest Person Ever?
In May 2018, the company announced their own dating service, called Facebook . For his senior project at Exeter, Zuckerberg wrote a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits and recommend other music. He posted it online on AOL and it received thousands of positive reviews.
He moved to Palo Alto, California, and received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel, the angel investor. The name was changed to simply Facebook and the company went public in 2021. It raised $16 billion, which was the largest Internet IPO at the time and remains near the top of the largest IPOs in U.S. history. Since his early years as a programming prodigy, it was clear that Zuckerberg was capable of creating revolutionary technology.
The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day’s testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was “inevitable.” Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook. By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus.
Born in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg grew up with three siblings. He developed an early interest in computers, learning to program at the age of 12. While growing up, he created a messaging who is the father of facebook program using Atari BASIC to allow his father to communicate in his dental practice. He also spent his time developing computer games with his friends as part of his programming education. Mark Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he studied psychology and computer science.
What Did Mark Zuckerberg Create?
Since he founded Facebook when he was just 19 years old, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t have a career prior to his roles as co-founder and CEO. He developed computer games as a child and was tutored in coding from an early age. Founded by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, this organization asks members to give away half or more of their wealth as part of a philanthropic cause. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are committed to donating 99% of their shares and at least half of their wealth over the course of their life.
Zuckerberg also outlined actions that Facebook intended to undertake to prevent future incidents of this nature, including “safeguarding our platform,” “investigating other apps,” and “building better controls.” Later that month, Zuckerberg appeared on Capitol Hill to testify before House and Senate committees about Facebook’s use of consumer data. In prepared remarks before the Senate, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook had been beneficial in connecting people during the #MeToo movement and various disasters. In 2004, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, the three credited founders of HarvardConnection.com, sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing intellectual property from the website. They reached a multi-million dollar settlement of cash and stock options in 2008. The Winklevoss twins tried to reopen the lawsuit in 2011, but the court denied their request.
Microsoft investment (Series C)
Since founding Facebook and making a series of acquisitions, his net worth rose to an all-time record of $141 billion in September 2021. Due in part to Apple changing its privacy policy and other controversies, Meta’s stocks have been decreasing in 2022. This has caused a significant drop in net worth, leaving Zuckerberg with a net worth of about $60 billion as of July 2022.
Amazingly, the idea for Facebook—now the world’s most popular social networking page—was inspired by a botched effort to get internet users to rate one another’s photos. Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is a former Harvard computer science student who along with a few friends launched Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, in February 2004. Zuckerberg also has the distinction of being the world’s youngest billionaire, which he achieved in 2008 at the age of 24. Zuckerberg currently is the chief executive officer and president of Facebook. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched a new website called TheFacebook. He named the site after the directories that were handed out to university students to help them get to know one another better.
In June 2019, Facebook announced it was getting into the cryptocurrency business with the planned launch of Libra in 2020. Amid increasing calls for his resignation from investor groups, Zuckerberg traveled to Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers ahead of his two-day testimony, scheduled for April 10 and 11. The first day of hearings, with the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, was considered a tame affair, with some senators seemingly struggling to understand the business model that powered the social media giant. Zuckerberg’s company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site’s membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub. Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website Facebook out of his college dorm room at Harvard University.