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 site Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of
Facebook, Inc.
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 enrolled in Harvard, 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
2010, the site had an estimated 500 million users worldwide. Mark 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 Mark Zuckerberg has been named
among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world by Time
magazine's Person of the Year, In 2010 a fictionalized account of Mark Zuckerberg
creating Facebook while in college and its later start-up phase was made into a
movie dramatization, The Social Network.
Mark Zuckerberg life
Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in White
Plains, New York. He is the son of Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and
Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and
Arielle,[2] were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mark Zuckerberg was raised
Jewish, had his bar mitzvah when he turned thirteen, and has since described
himself as an atheist.
At Ardsley High School, Mark 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, Mark 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. In
college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.
Mark 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". Mark 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.
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, Mark 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 Mark 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.
During Mark 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 to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out
of 5 from PC Magazine. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Mark Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard University in September
2002.
Mark Zuckerberg Colleg
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. 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 Mark 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.
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. Mark Zuckerberg apologized publicly, and the
student paper ran articles stating that his site was "completely
improper".
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."
Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in
his sophomore year to complete his project.
Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his
Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. An earlier inspiration for Facebook
may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Mark 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.
Once at college, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook
started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Mark 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. Samyr Laine, a triple jumper representing Haiti at the
2012 Summer Olympics, shared a room with Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook's founding.
"Mark was clearly on to great things," said Laine, who was Facebook's
fourteenth user.
Mark Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto,
California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house that
served as an office. Over the summer, Mark Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested
in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Mark Zuckerberg,
the group planned to return to Harvard but eventually decided to remain in
California. They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy
out Facebook. In an interview in 2007, Mark 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 by
conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.
He restated these same goals to Wired
magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making
the world open." Earlier, in April 2009, Mark Zuckerberg sought the advice of
former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing strategies for Facebook.
On July 21, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg reported
that the company reached the 500 million-user mark. 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.
In 2010, Steven Levy, who authored the
1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Mark Zuckerberg
"clearly thinks of himself as a hacker". Mark Zuckerberg said that
"it's OK to break things" "to make them better".[37][38]
Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where
participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project. The
company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook
staff members, including Mark Zuckerberg, regularly attended. "The idea is that
you can build something really good in a night", Mark Zuckerberg told Levy.
"And that's part of the personality of Facebook now ... It's definitely
very core to my personality."
Vanity Fair magazine named Mark Zuckerberg
number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the
Information Age". Mark Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list
in 2009. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman's annual
survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.
In a 2011 interview with PBS after the
death of Steve Jobs, Mark 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".
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