Mark Zuckerberg

1984-present

Entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg is the founder, chairman, and CEO of the tech company Meta, which owns social networking platforms Facebook and Instagram. As a young computer programmer, Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with his friends at Harvard University in 2004 and later dropped out to concentrate on the site. Since then, Facebook’s user base has grown to more than three billion people, making Zuckerberg a billionaire many times over. Now the second-richest person in the world, the New York native also oversees Threads and WhatsApp, among other platforms, and has created 3D virtual reality spaces in the metaverse.

FULL NAME: Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
BORN: May 14, 1984
BIRTHPLACE: White Plains, New York
SPOUSE: Priscilla Chan (2012-present)
CHILDREN: Maxima, August, and Aurelia
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. His father, Edward, ran a dental practice attached to the family’s home, and his mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before becoming a stay-at-home mom. He was raised in the Westchester village of Dobbs Ferry with his three siblings Randi, Donna, and Arielle.

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age. When he was 12 years old, he used an Atari BASIC to create an instant messaging program he named “Zucknet.” His father used the program in his dental office so the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate with each other in their home.

Zuckerberg soon expanded his coding capabilities and began creating computer games with his friends. “I had a bunch of friends who were artists,” he told The New Yorker in September 2010. “They’d come over, draw stuff, and I’d build a game out of it.”

To keep up with Zuckerberg’s burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with him. Newman later told reporters it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy. While attending Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg began taking a graduate course at nearby Mercy College. The instructor mistook Zuckerberg’s father as the student the first day he dropped him off for class.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive college-preparatory school in New Hampshire. There, he became the captain of the school’s fencing team and earned a diploma in classics. Still, Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs.

For his senior project, he created an early version of music software similar to Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several companies, including AOL and Microsoft, expressed interest in buying the software and hiring the teenager before graduation, but he declined the offers.

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University, where he arrived with a reputation as a computer genius. By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he was the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users.

He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.

Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three fellow students—Divya Narendra and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to help them code a social networking site they were working on called HarvardConnection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard’s student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon backed out to work on his own social networking site.

In February 2004, Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin created TheFacebook, a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site out of a dorm room at Harvard University until June 2004, after which Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had 1 million users.

In 2005, Facebook dropped “the” from its name. The same year, Zuckerberg’s enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students. Zuckerberg’s company then granted access to other colleges, high schools, and even international schools, pushing the site’s membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005.

Facebook soon began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub. Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks, and instead focused on expanding the site, adding more features and opening up his project to outside developers.

Did Mark Zuckerberg Steal Facebook?

Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up, but his success was not without controversy. Just six days after launching Facebook, the creators of HarvardConnection, renamed ConnectU, accused him of intentionally misleading them and stealing their idea. Narendra and the Winklevoss twins took their allegations to the school newspaper the Harvard Crimson, which began investigating the matter in May 2004.

While Zuckerberg attempted to persuade the Crimson to not run the story, claiming he didn’t copy any features or designs used by ConnectU, the editors ultimately decided to publish the story. Zuckerberg then hacked into the email accounts of two editors using private login data from his site to read emails they sent about the allegations.

In September 2004, Narendra and the Winklevosses filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, alleging that the Facebook creator violated an oral contract to help build ConnectU and instead stole their source code and idea for his own site. They insisted that he needed to pay for their business losses. Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks.

After lawyers searched Zuckerberg’s records, incriminating instant messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users’ private information to his friends. Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them.

The tech mogul told The New Yorker: “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I’ve grown and learned a lot.” Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regard to the value of their stock.

The Social Network Movie

In October 2010, The Social Network, a movie based on Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, was released to critical acclaim. The screenplay, written by Aaron Sorkin, was based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book Accidental Billionaires, which was heavily criticized for its depiction of Zuckerberg’s story.

Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film’s narrative, insisting that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. “Basically the framing is that the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls,” he said at a startup conference later that month.

While the film suggests Zuckerberg created Facebook to attract women after a breakup, Zuckerberg said he was dating his now-wife Priscilla Chan at the time. “It’s interesting what stuff they focused on getting right—like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own. So there’s all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right,” he said at a start-up conference.

In spite of The Social Network’s apparent criticism, he continued to succeed. Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year and made the top of Vanity Fair’s New Establishment 2010 list.

Facebook IPO

In May 2012, Facebook had its initial public offering (IPO), which raised $16 billion and valued Facebook at $104 billion, making it one of the biggest Internet IPOs in history. After the initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the early days of trading, though Zuckerberg weathered the early ups and downs in his company’s market performance.

The following year, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, who was 28 at the time, the youngest CEO on the list.

Instagram and WhatsApp

In April 2012, the Facebook company acquired the photo-sharing social media site Instagram for $1 billion. The high price tag made headlines—Instagram was just a small start-up with 13 employees at the time. The investment proved to be fruitful, however. Now a wildly popular site, the platform has over 2 billion active users worldwide.

Facebook made its largest acquisition in February 2014 when it bought messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion. The app remained largely untouched until 2019, when Zuckerberg announced he would be integrating the technical infrastructure of Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.

This led to the departure of the company’s original founders and employees, after Zuckerberg asserted more control and added more features, causing WhatsApp to surge in popularity. It now has close to 3 billion users.

The company also owns Beluga, Workplace, Ray-Ban Stories, Threads, Mapillaries, Reality Labs, and Meta Quest VR headsets.

Fake News and Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Zuckerberg was criticized for the proliferation of fake news posts on his site leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2018, he announced a “personal challenge” to develop improved methods for defending Facebook users from abuse and interference by nation-states. (Some of Zuckerberg’s previous “personal challenges” that began as New Year’s resolutions include only eating meat from animals he killed himself in 2011 and learning to speak Mandarin in 2010.)

“We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “If we’re successful this year, then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”

Zuckerberg came under fire again a few months later when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, had used private information from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting its owners. The resulting outcry seemed to shake investors’ confidence in Facebook—its shares dropped by 15 percent after the news became public.

Following a few days’ silence, Zuckerberg surfaced on various outlets to explain how the company was taking steps to limit third-party developers’ access to user information and said he would be happy to testify before Congress.

In March 2018, Facebook took out full-page ads in seven British and three American newspapers to apologize for the Cambridge Analytic scandal. In the ads, Zuckerberg promised the company would investigate the apps that had access to large amounts of user data and remind users which apps Facebook had access to so they could shut off data access. “I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” he wrote. “I promise to do better for you.”

Amid increasing calls for his resignation from investor groups, Zuckerberg traveled to Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers ahead of his two-day testimony, scheduled for April 2018. The first day of hearings with the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees was considered a tame affair, with some senators seemingly struggling to understand the business model that powered the social media giant.

The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day’s testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was “inevitable.”

Libra Cryptocurrency

In June 2019, Facebook announced it was entering the cryptocurrency business with the planned launch of Libra in 2020. Along with developing the blockchain technology to power its financial infrastructure, Facebook established a Switzerland-based oversight entity called the Libra Association, comprised of tech giants like Spotify and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz.

The news again put Zuckerberg in the crosshairs of Congress, which summoned the CEO to testify before the House Financial Service Committee in October. Despite providing assurances that Facebook would withdraw from the Libra Association if the project failed to garner approval from regulators, Zuckerberg faced pointed questioning from skeptical lawmakers who cited the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and other past transgressions. Libra—renamed Diem—shut down in 2022 amid regulatory concerns.

Misinformation and Hate Speech

In October 2019, Facebook announced the company would make efforts to combat misinformation on the site ahead of the 2020 presidential election, pledging to increase transparency by utilizing independent fact-checkers to label posts that are factually inaccurate. Still, Facebook was heavily criticized for the spread of false information about both the election and the COVID-19 pandemic the following year.

In May 2020, Zuckerberg refused to remove posts from President Donald Trump that promoted misinformation about mail-in voting and encouraged violence against protestors, causing dozens of Facebook employees to stage a virtual walkout. He defended his decision in a lengthy Facebook post, asserting that he is “committed to free expression.”

In September, Facebook revealed that all political ads would be halted the week before the election, and the following month, the platform announced it would ban “militarized language” about poll watching for the same time frame. Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Facebook banned Trump indefinitely before reinstating his account two years later.

Zuckerberg testified in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee once again in March 2021, this time regarding the spread of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook and its role in the Capitol attack. He rejected the idea that Facebook played a part in inciting the riot but admitted the platform generally has a responsibility to address misinformation. “I think there’s further work that we need to do,” the tech entrepreneur said.

Meta

Around this time, Facebook began efforts to rebrand the company and distance Zuckerberg from its scandals. In August 2021, Zuckerberg signed off on an internal initiative, known as Project Amplify, to promote positive stories about the social networking site in users’ News Feed. In October, he changed Facebook’s corporate name to Meta, of which he is the founder, chairman, and CEO.

“Now it is time to take everything that we have learned and help build the next chapter,” he said at a conference that month. “The future is going to be beyond anything that we can imagine.” This focus on the future included the rollout of a new virtual and augmented reality technology called the metaverse.

Opening in stages, Meta has so far launched three virtual 3D spaces—Roblox, Fortnite, and The Sandbox—where users can socialize and play games with their Meta Quest VR headsets. The company has also developed various open-source AI models. In January 2025, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would invest $60 billion into AI over the course of the year. Plans include building a 4 million-square-foot data center in Louisiana.

Ending Fact-Checking

That same month, the Meta CEO revealed the company would be ending its independent fact-checking program in favor of a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Citing fact-checkers’ political bias, he said content moderation on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.” Zuckerberg also changed Meta's content policies to remove restrictions on hateful conduct.

Since amassing his sizeable fortune, Zuckerberg has used his wealth to fund a variety of philanthropic causes. In September 2010, he donated $100 million to the Newark Public Schools system in New Jersey. That December, Zuckerberg signed the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Lucas.

After his donation, Zuckerberg called on other young, wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit. “With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts,” he said of the initiative.

In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give nearly all of their Facebook shares to charity. “We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children,” the couple wrote on Facebook. “We will give 99 percent of our Facebook shares—currently about $45 billion—during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation.”

In September 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the company into which they put their Facebook shares, would invest at least $3 billion into scientific research over the next decade to help “cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children’s lifetime.” Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The Rockefeller University was named the president of science at CZI.

They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a San Francisco-based independent research center that aims to unite engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists, and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, Biohub will receive an initial investment of $600 million over 10 years.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, CZI donated $25 million to the Gates Foundation’s coronavirus therapeutics accelerator to help fund the development of treatments for the virus. Around the same time, Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook would give $100 million to fund local journalism, with $25 million in grants going to news organizations in the United States and the other $75 million going to global news outlets.

Zuckerberg is married to Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician and philanthropist. The pair met at a fraternity party at Harvard University in 2003 and started dating soon after. They tied the knot the day after Facebook’s IPO in May 2012 in a surprise outdoor wedding. The ceremony, which took place in their backyard in Palo Alto, California, was attended by 100 friends and family. Guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan’s graduation from medical school but instead witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.

In December 2015, the couple welcomed their first child, a daughter named Maxima, Max for short. Zuckerberg and Chan had two more daughters together: August (named after her birth month), born in August 2017, and Aurelia, born in March 2023.

As of February 25, 2025, Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth is $227.2 billion, according to the Forbes real-time billionaires list. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his net worth slightly higher at $236 billion. Both publications rank him as the second-richest person in the world. Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire in 2008 at age 23, and his wealth only continued to grow following Facebook's IPO in 2012.

He now owns a 13 percent stake in the company, which has been renamed Meta, and is one of the largest shareholders of OpenAI. Zuckerberg also owns a $270 million compound in Kauai, Hawaii, called Koolau Ranch, which totals 1,400 acres. This includes a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter below the compound.

• With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts.
• If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I've grown and learned a lot.
• Understanding people is not a waste of time.
• Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are.
• I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do. I think people really undervalue the option value in flexibility.
• What Facebook is today isn't a set of information, it's a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information. They are only going to do that as long as they trust us.
• Everything I do breaks, but I fix it quickly.
• I would personally rather be underestimated. It gives us latitude to go out and make some big bets.
• Apps aren’t the center of the world. People are.
• Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.
• Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.
• People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
• [T]he real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
• A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible.

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