Mark Zuckerberg: biography of the founder of Facebook. Who runs Zuckerberg's Facebook page?

Mark Zuckerberg... This name is known to almost every person who has access to the Internet. Who is he? Programmer, businessman, philanthropist, family man and just a good guy who is in his own way at a young age achieved what many have been achieving for decades. This article will tell the biography of Mark Zuckerberg, the success story of his brainchild called Facebook, as well as interesting facts from his personal life.

Early years

The future billionaire was born on May 14, 1984 in the American city of White Plains, into a family of doctors. In his family, Mark was far from the only child. He also has three sisters: Randi, Donna and Ariel.

At the age of 10, young Mark Zuckerberg realized that he wanted to devote his life to programming. It was at this age that his parents bought him his first computer, on which he subsequently spent days on end. At first he wrote rather primitive programs, but over time his skills began to improve.

First successes

In high school, Zuckerberg created his own strategy game called “Risk,” and even then he was noticed by representatives of Microsoft, who offered him to work for them. Due to the fact that Mark was a minor and had not yet graduated from high school, the deal never materialized.

The next project of the future co-creator of Facebook was the Synapse program, which he wrote with his friend. This software was based on the Winamp audio player. It analyzed the musical tastes of listeners and showed a selection of similar compositions.

Studying at Harvard

This may surprise some, but programming was far from Mark’s only hobby. At the time of entering higher education, he was engaged in fencing, studied ancient languages, and also devoted a lot of time to mathematics. Oddly enough, he decided to enroll in the psychology department at Harvard. It was at this university that Zuckerberg began his path to success.

Creation of Facebook

While studying at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea of creating a website where students could communicate online. It is clear that it is very problematic to create such a large-scale project alone, so he enlisted the support of his comrades Dustin Moskowitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. Soon they were joined by who sponsored this project. After some time, a conflict arose with the latter, which was resolved only in the courtroom.

The main reason for Facebook's popularity is its convenience. Students could organize themselves into groups and areas that already existed in their educational institutions. They had the opportunity to add their photos and any personal information - from favorite hobbies to love preferences. Mark Zuckerberg's company notes two main differences between Facebook and other popular social networks. First of all, it's real here existing people looking for exactly the same people. Secondly, on this site you can choose which groups of users can access your data - only people from the university or absolutely all site visitors, only people from your city or, for example, all Frank Sinatra fans, etc.

The social network needed good promotion, which was undertaken by prominent entrepreneur Peter Thiel. As a result, this promotion led to the incredible popularity of Facebook. Already in 2006, this site entered the TOP of the most popular sites in the USA.

So who is the real author?

Which was originally created for Harvard students, has gained great popularity outside of this educational institution. But not everything was as smooth as it might seem at first glance. Two brothers who studied with Mark in the same department accused him of stealing the idea. This is partly true, since they previously invited him as a programmer to create a similar site. They dragged Zuckerberg through the courts, but never won a single case. As a result, they were paid compensation in the amount of $45 million.

In addition to the success story of Facebook, many are interested in family life the creator of this site. We couldn’t help but take this into account, and therefore we present to your attention a few facts about Priscilla Chan, the wife of Mark Zuckerberg.

Priscilla achieves her goals on her own. At the Quincy High School graduation in 2003, she was assigned to give the valedictorian speech. In America, only those schoolchildren who performed well during educational process. After graduating from school, she entered Harvard to study biology. In the period from 2007 to 2008, she was engaged in teaching activities. After these events, Mark’s future wife entered the medical college in the pediatrics department, which she successfully graduated shortly before her marriage.
This may surprise some, but Mark Zuckerberg met his wife even before he created Facebook and became a famous billionaire. Their first meeting took place at a university party, when they... Standing in line for the toilet.
Mark and Priscilla don't like pathos and glamour. IN free time they prefer to walk in the park, play bocce (a game similar to bowling and petanque), and spend evenings playing board games. In addition, many journalists have repeatedly criticized the Zuckerberg family for their tasteless dressing and lack of style.
Priscilla is the initiator of the organ donation program on Facebook, and is generally active in charitable activities with your spouse.
Before their wedding, Mark and Priscilla dated for almost 10 years. When they decided to tie the knot, they tried to make sure that this news did not get into the media. Moreover, they did not even tell their relatives about it. Priscilla invited them to a party, and the reason for the celebration was receiving a scientific degree. Only during the celebration did everyone find out that this couple had arranged a wedding.

Mark Zuckerberg's children

At the time of writing this publication, Mark and Priscilla are the parents of two daughters - Maxim (or as Max's parents call her) and August. The first was born in 2015, and the second two years later.

Is Zuckerberg the grandson of Rockefeller?!

In 2017, the famous banker David Rockefeller left our world. Almost immediately after this event, the world community was stirred up by an incredible rumor: Mark Zuckerberg is actually the grandson of David Rockefeller, and his real name is Jacob Michael Greenberg!

According to unofficial news sources, the story of the creation of Facebook is an ordinary fiction, invented as a distraction. In their opinion, this whole story about a working-class student who, together with his friends, created a multimillion-dollar social network, was created so that young people believed that they could achieve success from scratch. According to these sources, Mark Zuckerberg is just a pawn in the hands of more powerful people, and Facebook is a global surveillance system created by the CIA. The same media called Zuckerberg the great-grandson of Maurice Greenberg, a famous American entrepreneur and owner of the largest insurance companies, CEO of AIG and VC Starr.

At this time, these unofficial sources have not provided any evidence that the above information is true. As we already mentioned, Mark Zuckerberg was born into a family of ordinary doctors. His father was a dentist and his mother was a psychiatrist.

"Social Network"

Released in 2010 feature film about Mark Zuckerberg called "The Social Network". The director of the film was the director and the screenwriter - The synopsis of the film is as follows:

At the center of the story is a 21-year-old student named Mark. He studies at the prestigious Harvard University and is in a relationship with his girlfriend Erica Albright. Mark is the type of person who feels good only when surrounded by people like themselves. The strangeness of his character and obsession with his studies ultimately led to his girlfriend leaving him. After these events, the protagonist’s neighbor suggested that he compare photographs of university girls online. Mark, wanting revenge on his ex-lover, approved this idea and successfully implemented it. After this success, students from the prestigious Harvard club pay attention to Mark and offer him interesting project. But the main character already has his own idea and it is much more global.

Facebook creator's opinion on the film "The Social Network"

Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg initially stated that he would not watch David Fincher’s film, he still got acquainted with it. The Facebook creator praised the film for its accuracy of everyday details (like the T-shirts and flip-flops worn by main character), but criticized it in other aspects. First, he noted that a character named Erica Albright never actually existed. Secondly, he didn't like the idea that the main character created a social network just because of his ex-girlfriend. According to Zuckerberg, this goes against reality, since he created Facebook only out of interest in what he loved.

Despite the statements of the real Mark, the author of the story, Aaron Sorkin, whose script is an adaptation of Ben Metzrich’s novel “Accidental Billionaires: The Making of Facebook, a Story of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,” insisted that the events of the film were not made up. On top of that , he noted that Erica Albright, played by actress Rooney Mara, is a real-life woman whose real name has been changed.

One of the producers of “The Social Network” even stated that this film is nothing more than a metaphor through which director David Fincher showed the ways people communicate with each other. He also thanked Mark himself for allowing them to use events from his life as the basis for the film.

I would like to conclude our article with a few interesting facts about Zuckerberg and his brainchild:

We have provided you with a biography of Mark Zuckerberg, a photo of this millionaire, facts from his personal life, as well as the story of his incredible success. We hope that this article was interesting to you and you learned a lot of new things!

Mark Zuckerberg- founder and developer of the popular Facebook network, the youngest billionaire in history. In 2010, he was recognized as Person of the Year by American Time magazine. As the publication explains, the 26-year-old billionaire was elected person of the year for “uniting more than half a billion people and drawing a map of social relations between them, creating new system exchange of information, and changed our lives"

In 2010, the number of Facebook users exceeded 500 million people, and the figure of Zuckerberg was “mythologized” by Hollywood - in the fall of 2010, the film “The Social Network” was released on the screens about the history of the creation and development of Facebook.

« In a world where social structures above all, a virtual, publicly accessible dossier is an information bomb. And in general, if a person has brains, he simply does not have the moral right to work not for himself, giving most of his time and the results of his achievements to his employer.» Mark Zuckerberg

Success story, Biography of Mark Zuckerberg

Childhood, youth and student years of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains in southeastern New York. He was the second of four children and only son in an intelligent family of a dentist and a psychiatrist.

Mark learned that the world is divided into programmers and users when he was 10 years old and received his first PC (Quantex 486DX on an Intel 486 processor). Users are working on the computer. Programmers use computers to change the world. After the computer appeared, Mark felt terribly grown up and at first literally did not leave his new toy. After a couple of months, he got tired of simply changing the background color, and he began to read smart books, deciding to learn something more useful, namely programming.

Reading was good for me. Mark mastered the programming wisdom perfectly and, while still studying at high school, wrote several small programs, for example, a computer version of the popular board game Risk. But not all of his crafts were so harmless. In principle, Zuckerberg himself says that he would not like to immediately create something global, but would be happy to do a bunch of cool little things, and the Synapse program is one of those. He wrote it for himself. The program was a smart mp3 player, which, having carefully studied the owner’s preferences and found out what music, at what time of day and how often, he listened to, was able to generate playlists independently, “guessing” which tracks the owner would want to hear right now. Both Microsoft and AOL became interested in the unusual program, and both Microsoft and AOL became interested in Zuckerberg himself. However, the young talent rejected the giants' offers to purchase Synapse, and then politely rejected their invitations to cooperate. Just like that, Mark gave up several tens, and maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a job in one of the top IT corporations in the world.

It’s surprising that with such passion, Zuckerberg found time for other activities: he did well in mathematics and natural sciences. He devoted himself enthusiastically to such an extraordinary sport as fencing. I immersed myself in antiquity, studying ancient languages. Once I spent three months of school holidays at a summer school taking ancient Greek language courses. True, I changed my mind about enrolling in the corresponding department, but I retained the ability to read and write in both classical languages. And at the university I chose a rather unexpected, although understandable, discipline - psychology.

My university performance was so-so: my passion for programming took up too much of my time. Sometimes preparing for exams required extraordinary solutions, as, for example, in the episode with 500 paintings in an art history course. There were two days left before the exams, and it was impossible to read anything about each painting. Zuckerberg quickly created a website, on each page of which he placed a painting, and asked fellow students to comment on the works. “After two hours,” the innovator recalls, comparing himself to Tom Sawyer, painting a fence with the help of commercial savvy, “every picture was overgrown with comments, and I passed that exam with flying colors.”

Creation of Facebook

There was a section on the Harvard internal computer network where students posted their photographs and personal information. The photographs were so-so - the usual front and profile, tense expressions on their faces. And then it occurred to young Mark to have some fun: he made a program that selected two random faces and offered to compare who was sexier. There was no end to those wishing to conduct a comparative analysis. By the evening of the first day, four thousand people had viewed the site. When the number of visitors exceeded twenty thousand, the server crashed due to overload. Mark appeared before the computer hacking commission. Of course, they didn’t pat Zuckerberg on the head for this - he received a disciplinary sanction, but, apparently, even then he noticed that this kind of thing arouses intense interest among the people. Harvard, by the way, still refuses to comment on that incident.

However, the basis for the future communication masterpiece had already been created. On February 4, 2004, Mark launched a social network called “The Facebook,” which was intended as a communication site for Harvard students. “The Facebook” has become popular among students mainly because of the convenience of self-organization in groups, courses and parties that already exist offline in universities. By opening “The Facebook” you could find out where your acquaintances live this year, which girls are cute and which are not, who, in the end, is this year’s newcomer... all this is very reminiscent of what Facebook is today.

After the launch of the site, Zuckerberg told the press that Facebook was written in just a week, and this idea simply matured in his head and was quickly implemented, “on the spot.” Fortunately, fellow students also helped - together with Mark, Eduardo Severin, Dustin Moskowitz, Andrew McCollum and Christopher Hughes were involved in the launch of the project.

Very quickly, the social network created by Zuckerberg outgrew the boundaries of the campus (Let me remind you that at that time there were no “classmates” and “Twitters”; they were cloned later); already in the spring of 2004, it included all Ivy League colleges. Users were invited to post photographs and any information about themselves - from scientific and creative interests to gastronomic and love preferences. And also photographs, photographs, photographs...

Serious and promising projects at the stage active development, as a rule, require substantial investments. But as life shows, these issues can be solved if there are determination.

Mark spent all the money his parents set aside to pay for his studies on the business, but naturally this was not enough for the megaproject. And so one summer Zuckerberg rushed to Silicon Valley, where interesting ideas, if you're lucky, they may get support. And again luck smiled on the assertive guy. Like the hero of the Finnish writer Martti Larni, who left home for matches and ended up in America, student Zuckerberg went on reconnaissance and got stuck in Palo Alto - the heart of Silicon Valley.

One evening on the street, he chanced upon Sean Parker, an Internet cult figure and one of the creators of the file-sharing program Napster. It turned out that Parker was moving to Palo Alto, but did not yet have an apartment. " We(Mark and his friends) we just invited him to spend the night with us", says Mark. It was Parker who introduced Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, co-founder of the PayPal payment system. An experienced businessman, after a fifteen-minute conversation, invested the red-haired youth for 500 thousand dollars. Zuckerberg wrote an application to the university for an indefinite period academic leave, as another famous Harvard “dropout” - Bill Gates - did at one time.

Half a million is just a lot of money at first glance. Mark and his team perfected their brainchild in rented premises in Palo Alto, some sitting on wobbly chairs, some right on the floor. There was no ventilation in the rooms where the servers were located. Under the Californian summer heat at 45 degrees the plastic racks melted at the edges.

In November 2004, the number of users exceeded one million. Another six months later, with the help of Peter Thiel, the company managed to receive serious funds - $12.7 million from Accel Partners. In the fall of 2005, there were already more than 5 million active clients.

Soon the portal announced free registration for any user with a valid email address. The percentage of customers over 30 has grown significantly, and Facebook has established itself among the leaders of the Internet, consistently remaining the seventh most popular site in America.

In 2006, Zuckerberg began receiving the first purchase offers. At first the amounts were very cautious, but they began to increase quite quickly. They offered $750 million, but Mark refused and said that this was three times less than the amount about which serious discussions could be held. Later, at the already mentioned negotiations with Yahoo, there was talk of a billion, but Zuckerberg again said no. Rumors claim that there was also an offer from Google, and they gave more, but Facebook remained in the same hands, and the rumors remained rumors.

The site, meanwhile, grew not only with people, but also with new services, both successful and outright failures. It was clear to everyone in the company that they were sitting on a lot of money, but coming up with elegant ways to get it from users was not such an easy task. Tried it on the site various methods implementation of contextual, as gentle as possible, advertising. In this regard, there were also scandals, in particular related to data privacy (which turned out to be a big question) and the inability to permanently delete your account. In general, everything is natural - the larger the community, the greater the unrest.

2007 was definitely a year of change for Facebook. To begin with, Microsoft acquired a 1.6% stake in the company for $240 million. It is easy to calculate that in Microsoft's understanding, the total value of Facebook is equal to 15 billion pieces of paper with portraits of dead presidents. Where are Yahoo and Google with their modest amounts?

In 2009, Facebook officially opened the platform codes to everyone, so everyone had the opportunity to create new applications for the site, be it toys, horoscopes, calendars, or something else entirely. By the way, now more than 140 new applications are added to the site every day.

Madness has gripped the world. Even the casual dating model has changed. The phrase “Can you give me your phone number?” was replaced by a request for a link to a Facebook profile. And this is really convenient: instead of taking a long time to check by trial and error whether a person is right for you or not, you can simply look at his personal page. The popularity of Facebook has ensured the convenience of self-organization by interest groups that already exist offline or newly created.

A vengeful thief or a victim of envious people?

The launch of the project was accompanied by a scandal. Six days after the site opened, senior students, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, accuse Zuckerberg of stealing their idea. They claim they hired Zuckerberg in 2003 to complete the creation social network HarvardConnection.com. According to them, Zuckerberg did not transfer the results of his work to them, but he used the work he received from them to create Facebook.

That same year, the Winklevosses and Narendra launched their network, renamed ConnectU. And they continue to attack Zuckerberg, complaining about him to the Harvard administration and the Harvard Crimson newspaper. At first, Zuckerberg convinces journalists not to publish the investigation: he shows what he allegedly did for HarvardConnection.com and explains that these developments have nothing to do with Facebook. But very inopportunely, another Harvard student, John Thomson, begins to say in personal conversations that Zuckerberg stole one of his ideas for Facebook. The newspaper decides to publish the article, which greatly offends Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg takes revenge on the Harvard Crimson. According to the Silicon Alley Insider resource, in 2004 he hacked into the mailboxes of two journalists of the publication using the newly launched Facebook. It finds all users who indicate their affiliation with the newspaper and looks at the logs (i.e. history) of the incorrect passwords they entered into Facebook. Zuckerberg's calculation was justified: two newspaper employees absent-mindedly tried to log into Facebook with the password for their email. Silicon Alley Insider claims that Zuckerberg was lucky: he read with interest comments in their correspondence about the editorial team’s communication with him and HarvardConnection.com.

The Winklevoss brothers and Narendra sue, but the court rejects their claim. They prove persistent and file another lawsuit. The second court conducts an examination of the source codes to understand whether they were actually stolen. But the truth is still not clear. The results of the examination were not made public: in 2009, Zuckerberg agreed to pay $45 million ($20 million in cash and the rest in Facebook shares) to ConnectU as part of a pre-trial settlement. After this, the case was closed. By that time, ConnectU had fewer than 100,000 users, while Facebook boasted 150 million.

But the Winklevoss brothers did not rest on this; they filed a petition with the US Federal Court of Appeal, but they were denied a review of the case. According to their lawyer, Jerome Faulk, the appeals court denied the brothers a review of the case, based only on a settlement agreement between the parties, which states that the parties to the trial, once signed, have no right to reopen the trial. According to the lawyer, decision made illegal, since Mark Zuckerberg provided false information about the company's value during the proceedings in 2008.

On May 17, 2011, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss filed a lawsuit against the owner of the social network Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, in Supreme Court USA. This is the brothers' last attempt to reconsider the case.

Lifestyle of Mark Zuckerberg

Having received the status of a billionaire, Zuckerberg himself did not change his lifestyle. As usual as a student, he rents a house (apartment) with a minimum of amenities in Palo Alto, where there is not even a bed, and sleeps on a mattress on the floor. The way to work overcomes on foot or by bicycle. Favorite appearance- worn-out trousers, a T-shirt and sandals on bare feet. True, he admits that for trips to such “adult” events as the forum in Davos, he has a decent suit in stock. His girlfriend's name is Priscilla Chen and she is of Chinese descent. Our hero, still in his first year at Harvard, confessed in an online diary that he liked Asian girls.

The spirit of the young founding father is reflected at Facebook's headquarters. The three buildings look decent and modern, but have not lost the image of a student dormitory. Casually dressed employees, whose number has already exceeded 400 people, show up at work late after lunch, but also stay until the roosters. To ensure that everyday life does not interfere with creativity, meals, clothes washing and other services are provided right in the office, and free of charge.

It is impossible not to note Mark’s sensible view of his “empire”. He understands that technological breakthroughs are one thing, but business strategy is something else, and he is not as knowledgeable about these things. The news that Facebook has appointed veteran Google manager Sheryl Sandberg to run Facebook's day-to-day operations has been welcomed by the business community.

Aspirations of means mass media learning as much as possible about Mark Zuckerberg is rarely successful. This is because the author of such a successful project is an extremely secretive, inaccessible person who does not want to demonstrate himself. If there are very short interviews, then in them the young and talented figure is mostly lost, stammers, stammers, in general, feels very awkward in front of the camera (this happened on the Oprah Winfrey show). However, most analysts are convinced that this state of affairs is a temporary phenomenon and very soon Mark will definitely eclipse even the most advanced speakers of our time.

Secrets of Mark Zuckerberg's success

Unlike other famous billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg is in no hurry to reveal his secrets, therefore, many experts are independently trying to analyze the personality of the Facebook founder in order to understand how a 26-year-old young man managed to do something that 99 percent of people today cannot do?

The first thing to note is that Mark has always understood the difference between technological breakthrough and creative strategy. And if he is not strong in the latter, then he is happy to entrust this area of work to a good manager. Although in the field of management, Mark cannot be considered so mediocre, because in the most miraculous way the best of the best, specialists who have been hunted by large companies for years, end up on his team. Many argue that Zuckerberg has a rare ability to negotiate correctly.

Mark Zuckerberg is extremely demanding. He loves to argue, rarely praises his employees and strives to do everything to ensure that they work with their souls, completely devoting themselves to the task. However, there are simply no indifferent people in Mark’s team.

Many psychologists say that Mark’s modesty and unpretentiousness in terms of comfort contribute in every possible way to the fact that he can fully concentrate on his main mission - the development of the Facebook network. In general, the simplicity and even some carelessness in Mark’s business negotiations are legendary. So one day he refused a meeting with a Microsoft representative, which was scheduled for 8.00. " I'm still sleeping at this time", said Mark. When Zuckerberg was invited to discuss cooperation with Yahoo, he said that a girl was coming to see him that day. No talk about that we're talking about the billion dollar deal had no effect on Mark. There is no need to rush - Zuckerberg learned this principle back in his school years after the first offer from Microsoft. Today Mark is true to himself, and the money still flows into his hands. The youngest billionaire today has become the idol of millions of people who want to reach the same unprecedented heights. But only a few can do this...

What can we say today about Mark as a businessman and prominent IT figure? Perhaps nothing specific. Even experts disagree - some call Facebook the new Google, and Zuckerberg a replacement for Page and Sergey Brin, others speak out very cautiously, especially after trials and accusations of theft of ideas. It is still not entirely clear what in this whole story was a competent calculation, and what was luck and a wave caught by chance. The most common characteristic of Mark, heard from the mouths of most experts, critics and powerful of the world This boils down to one phrase: “He is still so young.” And it’s hard to disagree with this: Mark’s age really makes it difficult to consider who he is - a young genius or just a very lucky guy who is favored by circumstances.

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Talented people are talented in everything. Fencing, programming, knowledge of languages, psychology are far from full list hidden capabilities of a young, purposeful guy, Mark Zuckerberg. He managed to turn favorite activity into a profitable business, creating a world-famous social network. Today, Facebook is one of the five most visited sites, and its founder became the youngest billionaire on the planet. What brought an ordinary guy to success?

Mark Zuckerberg: biography, first steps

The future programmer was born into a family of doctors in the town of White Plains (USA). Zuckerberg's father found himself in dentistry, and his mother in psychiatry. Mark Elliott has 3 sisters - the eldest Randi and the younger Donna and Ariel.

Mark's acquaintance with information technology occurred quite early, at the age of 10. The guy received a gift from his father, Edward Zuckerberg, - the first PC. The surprise was an investment in his son's future education. Computers and digital radiography were just beginning to be used in the workplace, and the elder Zuckerberg actively took advantage of this advantage. Edward became the first mentor in Mark's life, teaching him the Basic programming language. The child was so carried away by the new activity that within a couple of years he was writing the ZuckNet program to improve the work of his father’s dental clinic. The program allowed Edward, who was in the office, to communicate with his family and assistants.

In his free time, the talented child created computer games and received additional knowledge from a private tutor.

Zuckerberg's versatility

Programming wasn't Mark's only area of expertise. While studying at Phillips Exeter Academy, the smart guy was interested in literature, mathematics, languages and fencing. In his university resume, Mark indicated knowledge of languages such as French, Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew. Often in literature classes, Zuckerberg quoted passages from original works.

The future billionaire's sporting achievements were also outstanding. His passion for fencing led to the dominant position of captain in the school team.

First successes in programming

Despite being successful in many fields, Mark's heart and soul belonged to programming. While studying at the academy, Zuckerberg wrote the Synapse program with his classmate Adam D'Angelo. The invention was a music player capable of analyzing the tastes of the owner and, according to the information received, creating playlists. This program was created for personal use, but the creators shared it with the public on a special website. The creation was noticed by two well-known companies, Microsoft and AOL, and Zuckerberg received an offer to sell the product and then working together. However, the guy decided to refuse the world IT giants, justifying his decision with the words that “inspiration is not for sale.”

Instead of concluding an agreement with world leaders, Zuckerberg entered the prestigious Harvard University to major in Psychology.

University studies

At Harvard, Mark diligently studied psychology, not forgetting about improving his programming skills. Zuckerberg was a member of the Jewish student society Alpha Insilon Pi, studied diligently and attended computer courses.

The second year of study was marked by the creation of two computer programs. The first invention, called CourseMatch, helped students decide on course choices based on the experiences of other students. The second creation was called Facemash and lasted only 2 days. The program consisted of choosing the most attractive one out of two students. Thus, a list of the most popular students at the university was formed. The invention had real photographs of students, which was the reason for large quantity complaints and project closure. Zuckerberg admitted to hacking the Harvard database, but explained his behavior as a simple desire to joke.

Soon everyone forgot about the failed joke. However, the incident became decisive for three of his fellow students, who were selecting a team to create a new project, HarvardConnection.com. Mark played an important role in programming the social network. Zuckerberg accepted the offer, but soon left the project due to being busy with another creation.

Birth of Facebook

Work on the site started in January 2004. Sophomore student Mark Zuckerberg registered a domain called thefacebook, and already in early February the project was seen by the world. Initially, it was a social network for communication between Harvard students. Within a day, about a thousand people registered on the site, and a month later, a good half of the students had their own page on the social network.

The site's growth required more people to work on it. Classmates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskowitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes joined Mark. Thanks to efforts and financial investments, within a few months the network became available to Stanford, Columbia and Yale universities. Over time, the list expanded to include Ivy League universities, top educational institutions Canada and USA.

The development of the social network was rapid and successful. In the summer of 2004, Facebook was created, with Sean Parker as its president, and general director occupied by Mark Zuckerberg. The guy decided to take an example from Bill Gates and quit his studies at Harvard, devoting himself entirely to the project.

A new page in the history of Facebook began in 2005, when the facebook.com domain was acquired. From that moment on, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network not only became a place for students to communicate, but also gave anyone the opportunity to plunge into the electronic world.

Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg was recognized as the youngest billionaire in the world, and his project continued to flourish. Today, the Facebook network has more than 1 billion users.

Below are some interesting facts about Mark:

Meeting your future wife

Mark Zuckerberg met his wife Priscilla Chan at one of the student parties at Harvard. They dated for nine years and finally legalized their relationship in 2012. The wedding ceremony took place in the circle of relatives and friends. Initially, the event was intended to celebrate the successful completion of studies future wife and the listing of Facebook shares on the stock exchange. However, the couple presented unexpected surprise and announced her wedding.

The billionaire's chosen one has American and Chinese roots. The girl studied at the Faculty of Biology at Harvard, and then at the Medical College in San Francisco, in the Department of Pediatrics. In 2015, Priscilla began working to open a special school that would incorporate educational and health promotion elements.

Despite their enormous wealth, the couple are not partygoers and social events, preferring board games and walks in nature.

First experience of fatherhood

Mark and Priscilla for a long time dreamed of adding to the family, but the girl had miscarriages. In December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg's first child was born. Maxim's daughter Chan (Max) lit up the social network with her appearance just a few days after birth. The non-superstitious Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo with a child on his personal page Facebook. The happy dad took two months off to enjoy the joy of fatherhood.

Charity

In 2010, the billionaire joined charitable organization The Giving Pledge, which encourages wealthy people to give half of their wealth to those in need.

Mark Zuckerberg with his wife and children (they are still part of the plans of the young married couple) will give 99 percent of the Facebook shares (today about $45 billion) that they own to charity. The joyful couple made this statement after the birth of their daughter. The future should offer opportunities for everyone, regardless of their social status and financial well-being.

In addition, Zuckerberg supported the Diaspora project, which was a direct competitor to Facebook. Mark allocated $100 thousand for the development of an open source social network. The billionaire showed concern for the development of public schools in Newark. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to improve them.

Visit Russia

In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg flew to Russian Federation. After staying on its territory for three days, the young billionaire managed to complete many important missions. One of them was a meeting with the Prime Minister of Russia. Mark also gave a lecture for MSU students. To attend the meeting, you had to register. The number of applicants exceeded the capacity of the audience, so a lottery was held among those who signed up. At the lecture, the billionaire shared with the audience the history of the creation of the famous social network and told his story. In addition, Zuckerberg took part in several Russian programs and was actively involved in an international conference created by him. The conference discussed the advantages of the Facebook network, the main one being the huge number of active users.

Mark Zuckerberg's titles

Mark Zuckerberg has already won the following titles:

The youngest billionaire in the world according to Forbes magazine.
Time magazine's Person of the Year 2010.
The most tastelessly dressed billionaire according to GQ magazine.

Mark Zuckerberg, whose photo you see in the article, is young, successful person. He managed to achieve a lot thanks to his perseverance and hard work. Let's wish him success and prosperity!

7 min. reading

Updated: 01/10/2017

If you look at the top ten richest people in the world by... Forbes version for 2013, you will see that for the most part these are elderly, experienced people who are over 70 years old.

– 74 years old, – 83 years old, Amancio Ortega – 78 years old, Charles Koch – 78 years old, etc. Well, it turns out like in the song “my years are my wealth”? And financial success does not come to those who have not “grown” to the required degree of business experience and life wisdom?

The exception among wealthy people is those whose wealth is greater than their age. He has not yet reached his retirement years, but ranks 2nd in the ranking of the richest (58 years old and a fortune of 67 billion dollars). It’s not in vain that we remembered the legendary founder of the corporation, because journalists strive to compare our today’s hero, Mark Zuckerberg, with him.

And if Bill Gates became a billionaire at 31, then Mark - at 22! And although Zuckerberg’s fortune is 19 billion dollars, and Gates’s is 67, Mark’s age is half that of Bill’s - only 29 years. Zuckerberg also ranks 3rd on the list of the most influential businessmen in the world in 2013.

Who is he, after all?

Meet Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the world's largest social network, Facebook. Haven't you heard of this? Are the sites Twitter, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki familiar to you? Even if you don’t like to spend your free time on online communication, you’ve probably heard about them. All of these sites were created in 2006, 2 years after Zuckerberg's brainchild. And although Facebook was not the first social network in the world, it was the one that became a real breakthrough.

More than 1.4 billion accounts are registered on Facebook (for comparison, VKontakte has 228 million users). This figure can be comparable to the world population in the 17th century! And if we talk about our time, then among the 7 billion people living on the planet, about 20% of people are Facebook users.

The scale is impressive. It seems Zuckerberg's dream is starting to come true: “The thing that really excites me is fulfilling the mission of creating an open society.”

For the fact that Zuckerberg created “a new system of information sharing and changed lives”, he receives the title “Person of the Year 2010” from Time magazine.

The slogan “liberty, equality and fraternity” is certainly a good one. But let’s not forget about the other side of this noble idea - profits. Mark's invention brought him fabulous income and the title of the youngest billionaire in the history of mankind!

After all, people registering for Facebook, represent a huge database. Most large companies in the US, Europe and Asia have their virtual representation on Facebook, and every 4th advertisement posted on social networks is from Zuckerberg’s company. Facebook's net profit for 2013 was $1.5 billion.

How can we not quote Mark himself? “The older I get, the more convinced I am that voyeur service is best way earn money."

I remember an online joke: “In connection with the emergence Facebook-a, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, psychologists intend to exclude exhibitionism from the list of perversions.”

In 2006, Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook for $750 million and was right - by 2014, the market value of the social network had increased to 150 billion!

Mark's biography will be short. He hasn't had time to live yet long life full of ups and downs, and therefore will boast not of quantity, but of quality past years.

What helped a boy from an intelligent Jewish family achieve worldwide fame?

Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York. Mark was the only heir, but he had three sisters. The family was quite wealthy, Mark’s dad worked as a dentist, and his mother was a psychiatrist. It is no secret that in the United States these professions are among the most paid.

At the age of 10, his parents gave Mark his first computer - a Quantex 486DX with an Intel 486 processor. Young Mark decided to take it up as an adult and began reading special books on programming.

Science came easily to him; the teenager enjoys coming up with various programs, such as, for example, a computer version of the strategic board game “Risk.”

For his own entertainment, Mark develops the Synapse program, which is a self-learning music player. Synapse independently generated a list of tracks, having previously remembered what kind of music a music lover prefers and at what time of day.

The story with Synapse is notable because Zuckerberg refused Microsoft, which offered the teenager to buy his development. Mark was also not interested in the invitation to cooperate from this largest corporation. Later he simply posted Synapse on open access. Perhaps he was already guided by his credo?

“If a person has brains, he simply does not have the moral right to work not for himself, giving most of his time and the results of his achievements to his employer”

I understand that after these words, people working “for their uncle” will not immediately sign a letter of resignation. But let this idea make you think about at least creating your own additional source of income.

Our hero was not a typical "nerd" sitting best years life in front of the monitor. His parents tried to raise a harmonious personality, developed in all respects, and they succeeded. Modern parents should not let their children's passion for computers take its course, but should encourage them to engage in physical education so that the child does not suffer from scoliosis or myopia.

Mark was actively involved in sports and was an excellent fencer. In addition to good performance in mathematics and natural subjects, he also found it easy to foreign languages. Now Zuckerberg can read French, Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew, and recently learned Chinese, because his wife has Chinese roots.

They say that it was at the prestigious private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where Mark studied, that the idea of creating Facebook was born. At school, new students were given a directory containing photographs and coordinates of all classmates. It was this that schoolchildren called “The Facebook,” literally “The Book of Faces.”

After school, Mark continues his education at Harvard with a degree in psychology. Success always follows on the heels of those who follow unbeaten paths. For the art history exam, Mark had to study half a thousand paintings, and there were only 2 days left before the exam.

Zuckerberg took an unconventional approach - he created a website on which he displayed these 500 paintings and asked fellow students to describe them. After 2 hours, each picture was overgrown with comments from students, which helped our innovator get a pass.

For the creation of another site - Facemash - Mark was punished by the Harvard administration. All the student did was hack into the university’s computer network, and, taking photos from there, posted them in pairs on his website.

The site worked on the “hot or not” principle, i.e. “hot thing” or “not”, and invited everyone to comment on the attractiveness of the characters. The result of Facemash’s 2-hour work was 500 visitors, and soon the server crashed due to the number of thousands of users.

The site was closed, and Mark was accused of hacking and encroachment on privacy. The charges, however, were dropped, and Mark saw that the simple idea of comparing photos worked well. And I seriously thought about creating a social network.

Facebook celebrates its birthday on February 4, 2004. In addition to Zuckerberg, his fellow students, Eduardo Severin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Christopher Hughes, also worked on the creation of the site.

The opening of the project was accompanied by a scandal. A week after its launch, undergraduate students, the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra, accuse Zuckerberg of stealing the idea.

In 2003, Mark was hired by them to complete the creation of the social network HarvardConnection.com. According to them, Zuckerberg did not give them the results of his work, but he used the results to open his website. Mark denies the accusations and says that he embodied an idea that was “flying in the air.”

He is convinced that a person “Whoever makes a comfortable chair should not pay everyone who makes the chairs.” However, in 2009, Zuckerberg had to pay his opponents $45 million to settle the case that went to trial.

Who knows how much truth there is in these accusations, but the proverb “winners are not judged” is still in use among the people. In response to all the speeches of spiteful critics, Zuckerberg replies: “You can’t make 500 million friends without making a single enemy.”

Facebook was originally developed for Harvard students to communicate. It was loved for the ease of searching for information and the availability of photos, and soon the site united students from other universities. Since 2006, Facebook has been opened to all users over 13 years of age.

Mark invested all the money his parents raised for his studies into his new project, but the rapidly growing business required additional cash injections. Zuckerberg goes to Silicon Valley to find investors for Facebook. The energetic guy is lucky - on the street he accidentally meets Sean Parker, co-founder of the file-sharing network Napster.

He, in turn, introduces him to Peter Thiel, co-founder of online payments PayPal. Peter immediately saw gold mine and invested half a million dollars in Mark’s project. Zuckerberg is no longer returning to Harvard.

The Facebook team rents space in Palo Alto, one of the cities in Silicon Valley. Mark knew how to understand personnel: “We acquired talent, which, for me, is one of the best things that could be done.” Now, for example, the management of current operations is not managed by Mark himself, but by an experienced manager from Google. The company's staff is working hard to ensure that the site "does not allow you to move away from the monitor."

At the company, Mark maintains the image of an eccentric billionaire. Somewhere he really is like that, somewhere he plays along, because according to the reviews of his partners (by the way, most of them bought the “ex” prefixes), he is not as simple as he seems.

These famous “pajama” negotiations, when Mark discusses serious topics in carelessly wrinkled clothes and flip-flops on his bare feet! And the answer to the Microsoft representative’s offer to meet at 8 am and discuss business cooperation was “I can’t come, I’m still sleeping at this time”! And Mark’s refusal to meet with Yahoo’s authorized representative because “a girl is coming to see me.” Somehow all this looks like a polite “fuck you”... Our bastard designs his business cards even cooler - the inscription on them reads “I’m the director here, bitch!”

Well, the rich “Generation Next” have their own quirks. Remember ours, who explains his quirks primarily by the desire to stand out from the crowd. Mark's are not so strange - the guy still loves to walk and ride a bike.

Mark celebrated his wedding with his beloved girlfriend Priscilla Chen not on an exotic island, like, and not in a luxurious mansion, entirely decorated with fresh flowers, like. Relatives and friends, supposedly invited to Priscilla's graduation party, suddenly discovered that they were at a wedding ceremony!

Childhood. Mark Zuckerberg's school years

Mark Eliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, a few kilometers from New York City, USA, into a family of doctors. Mark’s father still works as a dentist, and his mother is a psychiatrist by profession, but is not currently practicing. Zuckerberg is the second child and only boy in the family. Has three sisters - the eldest Randy and two younger ones - Donna and Ariel.

Computer programming attracted Mark back in school. In high school, Zuckerberg developed network version tactical tabletop strategy game"Risk", after which it was noticed Microsoft companies and AOL, who offered Mark employment. These offers were rejected by Zuckerberg - he decided to go to Harvard. Later, together with a friend, Zuckerberg developed the Synapse program for the Winamp audio player. This program determined the user's tastes and automatically generated a playlist based on the information received.

His passion for programming did not mean that the future billionaire spent days and nights in front of the computer. The boy's development was comprehensive: he loved fencing, mathematics, and enjoyed studying Latin and Ancient Greek. Mark was also interested in psychology - he entered Harvard for this specialty.

Harvard University. Creation of a social network

While studying at the Faculty of Psychology, Mark attended IT courses. It was there that Zuckerberg came up with the idea of creating a website for Harvard students to communicate with each other. The idea, in collaboration with Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes, took a week to implement. This is how Facebook was born. There was no money then, and another classmate of Mark’s, a guy of Brazilian origin, Eduardo Saverin, helped with finances. Subsequently, a conflict broke out between Zuckerberg and Saverin, and Mark removed Eduardo from managing Facebook. Saverin was not satisfied with this, and a legal battle began, which ended in Zuckerberg’s victory.

Mark Zuckerberg in the studio of Channel One

Now the young programmer needed to promote his brainchild. He didn’t know how to do it. Sean Parker, a cult figure of the American Internet, helped in promoting Zuckerberg. Sean introduced Mark to businessman Peter Thiel, who saw the prospects of the project and was ready to attract investment in it. By 2006, Facebook, which had long ceased to be a communication site for Harvard University students, became the seventh most popular Internet site in the United States. Zuckerberg begins to receive offers to sell the social network, but he unconditionally rejects them.

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

After graduating from university, Zuckerberg founded the Facebook company, monetized the site and began making money. The audience of the social network is growing steadily. In just three years, Mark becomes financially independent, and in 2009 he meets Yuri Borisovich Miller, co-owner of Mail.ru Group. At the end of May of the same year, the Russian Internet giant acquired a 1.96% stake in Facebook for $200 million. From this moment, other large corporations begin investing in the social network. Currently, Mark Zuckerberg owns 24% of Facebook shares and is considered the youngest billionaire in history.

In March 2010, Zuckerberg's fortune was estimated at $4 billion, and already in September of the same year, Mark almost doubled his assets, which amounted to $7 billion. On the list of the most influential Americans of 2010, Zuckerberg ranks 29th. In December 2010, the young billionaire became Time magazine's Person of the Year. At the same time, Mark announced his joining the so-called “Giving Pledge,” a philanthropic project founded by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. According to the campaign charter, 50% of the person who joined can be donated to charity, both during the life and after the death of the person who took the oath.

In 2011, the Facebook founder ranked 14th on the list of the wealthiest US citizens. His fortune is estimated at $17.5 billion. Further, the growth rate of Zuckerberg's assets slowed down, but Mark is constantly getting richer.

Zuckerberg's visit to Russia

In the fall of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg comes to visit the Russian Federation. For short term in three days the billionaire manages to meet with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, take part in two TV shows on Channel One and give a lecture at the Moscow state university. In addition, he accepts active participation in his own organization international conference developers of the “Facebook World Hack”, which took place in the Russian capital on the same days.

Meeting between Medvedev and Zuckerberg (FULL VIDEO)

At this conference, Mark states that the main advantage of the social network he created compared to other similar projects (hinting, first of all, to VKontakte) is the largest number of active users on the Internet. Zuckerberg encourages developers to create apps for the social network, not for local networks, explaining this by access to an audience of almost 1 billion users, unprecedented in the history of the global Internet community.

On October 2, Mark gives a lecture in the auditorium of the Moscow State University Library. At an open lecture, Zuckerberg talks about himself, about the history of the creation, development and monetization of Facebook. The number of people wishing to attend the lecture was much greater than the actual capacity of the audience, and a lottery was held between registered students to receive invitation cards.

Personal life of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg and his current wife Priscilla Chan met in line at public toilet at one of the student parties. This was during my second year at Harvard. Mark and Priscilla dated for nine years, and in 2012 they decided to legalize their relationship. Not wanting to advertise the wedding, the couple invited friends to country house Zuckerberg in Palo Alto, ostensibly to celebrate Priscilla receiving her MD degree. However, after everyone had gathered, it was announced that Zuckerberg and Chan's wedding would take place that evening.

The Zuckerbergs are very humble people. When appearing in public, giving interviews, Zuckerberg always remains silent and stutters, gets lost, and feels awkward. Mark also cannot be called a fashionable and stylish dresser - GQ magazine recently called the billionaire “the most tasteless resident of Silicon Valley.” IN lately young people generally try not to appear in public, devoting time exclusively to each other, and donating a sufficient portion of their funds to charity.