Mark Zuckenberg

Mark Zuckenberg

Early life and education

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American businessman and philanthropist. 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 executive chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York to psychiatrist Karen 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 immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland. Zuckerberg initially attended Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He was captain of the fencing team.

Software development

Early years
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.

College years

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.

Facebook

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

Zuckerberg's Facebook started as just a "Harvard thing" until he spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia University, New York University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and Yale University.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to complete the project. Zuckerberg and the other co-founders moved to Palo Alto, California, where they leased a small house that served as an office. They got their first office in mid-2004.

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 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 endeavours, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.