Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, who was born on 14 May 1984, in White Plains, New York, is the son of a psychiatrist and a dentist. Raised in a Reform Jewish household with three sisters, he attended Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was captain of the fencing team. His great-grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland.

Mark attended Harvard University in 2002. In 2004, he launched thefacebook.com, which later became Facebook. The site quickly gained popularity, allowing registered users to create profiles, upload photos and media, as well as keep in touch with friends through trusted connections. Mark’s emphasis on networking included information dissemination to friends of friends, which he called the “social graph.”

Taking Facebook To The World

In 2004, Mark, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (the latter two who were Mark’s roommates at Harvard) moved their base to California and convinced venture capitalist Peter Thiel to invest. Zuckerberg became CEO and president, dropping out of Harvard. Facebook received its first big venture capital funding ($12.7M) in May 2005. By September 2006, Facebook was open to anyone with an email, and international colleges and universities had joined.

Instead of selling the site to companies like Yahoo! and MTV Networks, Zuckerberg chose to concentrate on enhancing Facebook by adding features to the software and inviting outside developers to participate.

Facebook had its record-breaking $16 billion initial public offering in May 2012. Despite the early fluctuations in stock price, Mark remained resilient. In 2013, Facebook got onto the Fortune 500 list, with 28-year-old he becoming the youngest CEO to do so

The Lawsuit With The Winklevoss Brothers

The Winklevoss twins, along with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, co-founded HarvardConnection (later ConnectU). In 2004, they sued Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of stealing their idea to create Facebook.

In the end, the Winklevoss twins and their legal team agreed to a settlement in which they would receive $20 million in cash and the remainder of the $65 million settlement in the form of stock.

His Personal Life

Mark married Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, in 2012, one day after Facebook’s IPO. They have two daughters, Max and August. Zuckerberg announced both pregnancies on Facebook and took two months of paternity leave after Max was born.

Philanthropic Work

As one of the richest people in tech, Mark is known for his philanthropic efforts, including donating billions of dollars to charity and founding the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Established in 2015, the Initiative aims to tackle pressing societal issues, such as disease eradication, education enhancement, and community needs. Its goal is to construct a future that is equitable, fair, and healthy for all.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative combines technology with grant making, impact investing, and collaboration to accelerate progress towards their mission in Science, Education, and community work.

Interest In Virtual Reality

Mark Zuckerberg staked the future of his trillion-dollar company on the development of a metaverse in 2021 and changed its name to “Meta.” He estimated the project would require $10 billion in 2021, with even higher costs in subsequent years.

The aim is to expand the metaverse to include everything from avatars and online shopping to real money roulette, and to reach one billion individuals and generate billions of dollars in commerce over the next ten years.