Mark Zuckerberg

Cofounder, chair, and CEO of Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, Inc.

• Born: May 14, 1984
• Place of Birth: White Plains, New York

Introduction

Computer programmer and social media visionary Mark Zuckerberg was the motivating force behind the creation of Facebook, which became one of the most popular and influential social networking sites in the world. He famously launched the site with a group of friends in 2004 while still in college. Facebook's massive success over the following years made Zuckerberg one of the wealthiest people in the world and a major figure in the technology industry. However, it also made him a frequent subject of controversy as Facebook faced numerous high-profile criticisms and scandals. Zuckerberg remained firmly in control of Facebook and its parent company (which rebranded as Meta in 2021) into the 2020s.

Early Life

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, and grew up in Dobbs Ferry. His father, Edward, was a dentist and his mother, Karen, a psychologist. Zuckerberg grew up with three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle. (Randi would become a senior marketer at Facebook.) Zuckerberg got his first computer, a Quantex 486 DX that ran on Windows 3.0, at the age of ten and began customizing it to fit his own needs. At the age of twelve, he created a messaging program, Zucknet, that his father used in the office and the family used at home. Zuckerberg also designed computer games, using graphics drawn by his artistic friends. His parents hired a tutor to teach him even more about computers.

While still in high school, Zuckerberg began taking classes at Mercury College. His parents felt that he was not getting everything he needed from his local high school, so after two years they sent him to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 2000. At that preparatory school, he took honors in math, astronomy, and physics, also serving as captain of the fencing team. He had a special talent for languages and could read and write in French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek.

At Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo, his roommate, created Synapse, an MP3 software program with the capability of creating playlists from users' music libraries. The program aroused the interest of Microsoft and AOL, and both companies offered to buy the program and wanted to hire Zuckerberg straight out of high school. Instead, Zuckerberg chose to attend Harvard University, where he began majoring in computer science and psychology in 2002.

During his sophomore year, Zuckerberg archived the Harvard Crimson newspaper as a way of identifying connections among students. He also created Facemash, a program that displayed images of students, which Zuckerberg had loaded after hacking into Harvard students' online identity photos, and encouraged other students to compare two photographs and rank them according to who was "hottest." The ensuing outrage led school authorities shut down the site, but Zuckerberg avoided expulsion.

Life's Work

Zuckerberg was only twenty years old in January 2004, when he cofounded TheFacebook.com with Harvard roommates Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin, based on the concept of a directory listing photos and information about students at the school. It was an early example of a dedicated online social network. The initial site, which was created over a two-week period, was online by February. As the site became more popular, it spread to other universities.

Zuckerberg and his collaborators realized that they could make a fortune off the site and moved to Palo Alto, California, in June 2004, leaving Hughes to finish his degree while managing public relations for Facebook. Almost immediately, controversy arose over the rights to TheFacebook.com. Classmates Divya Narendra and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss filed a lawsuit, claiming that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for the program after being asked to work with them on a dating site, the Harvard Connection. While insisting that he had not stolen their idea, Zuckerberg was advised by his lawyers to settle the suit with a package that included Facebook shares as well as cash. A subsequent suit by cofounder Saverin was also settled.

After meeting Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, the founder of the controversial music-sharing site Napster, became part of the early Facebook team. He negotiated the deal with PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in the new company. In 2005, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in the growing company, and Zuckerberg and company raised another $27.5 million from other investors, including Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.

When Viacom attempted to buy Facebook in 2006, Zuckerberg upped the asking price to $2 billion and Viacom backed down. He subsequently turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo, leading Fast Company to dub him "the kid who turned down $1 billion." By 2007, Facebook had climbed to twenty million users, introduced a new design, added network portals, and allowed outside developers to run applications on the site. That year, Facebook was valued at $15 billion.

By the end of 2009, Facebook had more than a thousand employees and was claiming more than 350 million users. That year, Ben Mezrich published The Accidental Billionaires, containing information largely based on interviews with Saverin, who was in the process of suing Zuckerberg. The book formed the basis for the movie The Social Network (2010), starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. The Facebook camp insisted that the book was fiction rather than true to life, and the general feeling was that filmmakers had added fictive material to the history to make the founding of Facebook more dramatic than it had been in real life. After viewing the film, Zuckerberg commented that the only thing filmmakers had rendered accurately was his wardrobe. Other Zuckerberg biographers, including David Kirkpatrick, also insisted that the film is more fiction than fact.

While Zuckerberg remained at the helm of Facebook, other cofounders left the company. Chris Hughes departed in 2007 to run Barack Obama's online campaign. Dustin Moskovitz retained the position of vice president of engineering until 2008.

By 2011, Facebook was facing a steady stream of high-tech employees moving to other companies. That year, a new lawsuit surfaced with Paul Ceglia, an ex-convict, claiming that he had emails to prove that Zuckerberg had promised him half of Facebook in 2003, when he was hired to work on the application then in progress. Facebook officials insisted that the case was without merit, and the lawsuit was later found to be fraudulent. Despite some problems, Facebook's userbase continued to grow. By 2011, 47 percent of Americans were registered. Facebook also claimed large memberships in countries around the world, including 31.8 million users in Germany, 31.6 million users in India, 19.9 million users in Canada, 18.6 million users in Brazil, 9.5 million users in Russia, and 7.1 million users in Egypt.

Part of the reason that Facebook was able to maintain the feel of a small company for as long as it did was that all desks, even those of Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, were in a general area. When moving to a much larger campus in Menlo Park, California, in 2012, Facebook maintained some of its former atmosphere by creating a cozy downtown area, complete with cafeterias and shops. Training sessions were regularly held at Facebook to emphasize the need for new employees to learn to adopt Zuckerberg's mode of thinking, and periodic all-night sessions were mandatory for Facebook developers. Hack, a word that has positive connotations for most techies because of its connotation of innovative exploration, was widely displayed in Facebook's offices.

As his fame and fortune grew, Zuckerberg became a high-profile philanthropist. In 2010 he signed the Giving Pledge, under which wealthy people pledge to donate at least half their fortunes to charity during their lives. In 2015 he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, cofounded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a charitable foundation promoting health and education programs. Zuckerberg and Chan pledged to donate 99 percent of their Facebook stakes over their lifetimes. In 2016, Facebook investors approved a new share class structure that would enable Zuckerberg to give away a large portion of his shares while still retaining control of the company by creating a class of shares that have no voting power. In 2017, Forbes magazine ranked Zuckerberg fifth on its list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of $56 billion. That year he also outlined his overarching vision for Facebook to serve as an engine of global interconnectivity promoting peace and innovation.

Zuckerberg continued to profit from Facebook's popularity and financial success; by early 2018 his net worth had increased to over $60 billion, according to Forbes. However, he also had to contend with serious issues facing his company. Facebook had long endured various criticisms, but even the more significant scandals previously seemed to have few implications for Zuckerberg himself. Yet following the controversial 2016 US presidential election, Facebook and Zuckerberg himself faced increasingly heavy backlash for the way the social media platform disseminated news, included false or misleading information popularly dubbed "fake news." Investigations suggested that Facebook and other social media sites had been manipulated by Russian-backed parties seeking to damage the presidential candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton and aid that of Republican Donald Trump, who won the election. By 2018 Zuckerberg announced on his own Facebook page that he took efforts to prevent this kind of interference personally, and would ensure the company did better.

Despite this promise, it was revealed in March 2018 that the private information of over 50 million Facebook users had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics company that had worked on the Trump campaign, without the users' consent. According to media reports, Facebook initially ignored the data breach and attempted to suppress the story. After finally acknowledging the leak of personal data, it claimed Cambridge Analytica no longer had access to the information when in fact it did. The scandal not only caused a public backlash against Facebook and hurt the company's stock performance, but also spurred lawmakers in both the United States and Great Britain to call for measures to be taken. Several politicians called for Zuckerberg to officially testify on data security, Russian interference, and related matters.

Zuckerberg was initially silent about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but later made statements indicating his and Facebook's commitment to confronting the issue. He even went as far as to take out full-page newspaper advertisements admitting how the company had failed users and promising to improve. After some resistance, he eventually also agreed to testify before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, though he avoided making a similar appearance for the British Parliament. Meanwhile, another scandal erupted in late March 2018 when an internal Facebook company memo was leaked that suggested the company valued its goal of connectivity even at the cost of negative results, such as cyberbullying or the coordination of terrorist attacks enabled by social media.

In July 2018 Zuckerberg made headlines when a report noted Facebook faced slowing growth and underperforming revenues, leading the company's stock price to drop sharply. Zuckerberg's personal wealth was estimated to have declined by almost $16 billion in a single day. However, Facebook's value recovered over the subsequent months.

Zuckerberg announced in June 2019 that Facebook was developing a cryptocurrency known as Libra. The project included significant investment in blockchain technology, as well as partnerships with various other technology companies and financial firms to create an organization to manage the currency. Libra drew considerable attention from financial regulators, and in October 2019 Zuckerberg was called to provide testimony to the US House Financial Service Committee. Meanwhile, as the 2020 presidential election campaign picked up, Facebook continued to be widely criticized for its management of political content. Zuckerberg personally defended the company's policy of not removing false or misleading political ads (and other controversial material), arguing that people deserved the opportunity to make up their own minds without censorship—despite critics' claims of the difficulty for many Facebook users to distinguish fake news. Amid much criticism, Zuckerberg did point to Facebook's efforts to remove potentially dangerous content and government-sponsored misinformation campaigns, and its increased in fact-checking operations.

In July 2020 Zuckerberg testified before Congress again, along with several other tech industry leaders, about antitrust concerns. Facebook continued to attract controversy, including critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. Trump and his followers often accused the company of anti-conservative bias, while many progressives complained about the ongoing proliferation of misinformation, including falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. After Trump was accused of spreading inflammatory content and a group of his supporters violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Zuckerberg responded by announcing that Trump's Facebook account would be suspended indefinitely. Facing increasing pressure to take action over fake news and political influence on Facebook, Zuckerberg announced the company was evaluating options. In March 2021 he was questioned about misinformation at another House of Representatives subcommittee hearing.

In October 2021 Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook's corporate operations would rebrand as Meta. He also outlined plans to expand from social media to what he dubbed the "metaverse," described as a next step of the internet that would integrate a wide range of products and platforms using virtual reality (VR) technology. Many observers suggested that the rebranding was in part an attempt to move away from the heavy criticism still surrounding Facebook. Scrutiny had increased still further after a former Facebook employee leaked a collection of internal documents related to issues of data privacy, misinformation, and other controversial subjects.

Through the remainder of 2021 and into 2022, Zuckerberg and Meta remained focused on the company's expansion into the VR industry and poured extensive resources into this effort. However, the company's flagship VR product, Horizon Worlds, was prone to bugs and proved relatively unpopular with consumers after its launch. This development proved a major setback for Meta and led some employees and observers to criticize Zuckerberg's focus on the metaverse as misguided. Antitrust concerns also continued to circulate. In July 2022 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) blocked Meta from purchasing Within, the maker of a VR fitness app, though the company challenged the FTC's decision.

Meanwhile, the company struggled financially, losing 60 percent of its market value between October 2021 and October 2022. Facebook continued to face stiff competition from other social media platforms, namely Chinese social media giant TikTok, which proved far more popular with younger users than Facebook. As a result, by September 2022 it was reported Zuckerberg's net worth had decreased by half, a loss of roughly $76.8 billion. At least partly due to these financial troubles, Meta laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022 and instituted a hiring freeze. In a letter to employees, Zuckerberg apologized and took personal responsibility for these actions, which he said were necessary due to a number of economic factors outside the company's control. Another major round of layoffs was announced in March 2023, following a broader trend in the high-tech industry. Zuckerberg was again called before Congress in January 2024 for a hearing about child safety online, during which he offered an apology to parents whose children had been harmed by social media.

Personal Life

The day after taking Facebook public on May 18, 2012, Zuckerberg married his girlfriend of nine years, Priscilla Chan. The timing was due more to her completing medical school the previous week than to the IPO. Giving up his trademark casual wear, Zuckerberg turned out in a suit, while Chan wore a dress designed by Claire Pettibone. Chan was escorted down the aisle by the couple's Hungarian sheepdog, Beast. Two months earlier, the couple had moved from a rental home into a $7 million five-bedroom home in Palo Alto.

In December 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan announced the birth of their daughter, Maxima "Max" Chan Zuckerberg. Chan and Zuckerberg's second daughter, August, was born in August 2017. Meanwhile, in May 2017, more than a decade after dropping out of the school, Zuckerberg received an honorary degree from Harvard University.

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