Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is only 32 years old and is the CEO and Co-founder of the most famous and popular social networking website- Facebook. He is one of the youngest billionaires in the world!
Childhood and Early Life
Mark was born on May 1984 in New York to a dentist father and a psychiatrist mother. He was the youngest and had three elder sisters and grew up in a Jewish household. Mark excelled in school and high school. He won many prizes in Science, Math and astronomy. He was also a language expert and could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin and ancient Greek.
He began using computers and writing software in his middle school. His father taught him basic programming and also hired a tutor to teach Mark. The tutor considered Mark as a computer prodigy in programming.
Harvard University and CourseMatch
Mark was accepted at Harvard University. By that time he was known as the internet whiz kid who had created many messaging systems. He studied psychology and computer science at Harvard. But he always wanted to make a programme that could connect people. So he created CourseMatch- a programme that helped students at Harvard connect with and form study groups and pick courses that suits their needs.
This became instantly a hit and there was a demand for students to connect with each other more. But Mark thought why only limit this to a University? He started working on new software and in February 4, 2004, Mark, from his dormitory room launched the Facebook.
Overnight the social networking site became famous and attracted people from all over the world. This started the career of Mark Zuckerberg as an entrepreneur, internet celebrity and the owner of a billion dollar website.
‘Facemash’ became ‘Facebook’
In Universities the students have books called Facebooks which have pictures of all students and names of people who lived in dorms. Facemash was the name that Mark had earlier thought of and went with this name for a weekend. It was built for fun, but it became so famous that the college had to shut it down. Due to the heavy load; it caused the Harvard servers to crash. Some students did not like the idea of the website using their pictures without permission and Mark was forced to apologize for his actions. Facebook has currently 1.44 million users every month!
Mark Zuckerberg is currently has a net worth of 36 billion dollars and is regularly featured on the Forbes 400 list.
After Facebook:
- Mark Zuckerberg has faced several lawsuits for rights of his networking website. One includes from one of the co-founders of Facebook itself.
- Mark Zuckerberg and his wife have given 99 percent of the shares of Facebook for various charitable purposes. They regularly contribute to social causes and make donations to ‘Newark Public schools’, San Francisco General Hospital and also to help victims of the Ebola disease in West Africa.
Awards and Achievements
- The Times Magazine named Zuckerberg the ‘Person of the Year’ in 2010.
- ‘The Jerusalem Post’ an Israeli Newspaper named Zuckerberg as the ‘Most influential Jew’ in 2011.