Personal life
Zuckerberg was born in
White Plains, New York to Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward, a dentist.
[1] Mark and three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in
Dobbs Ferry, New York.
[1] Zuckerberg was raised
Jewish, including having his
bar mitzvah when he turned 13,
[9][10] although he has since described himself as an
atheist.
[10][11]At a party put on by his fraternity during his sophomore year, Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, who subsequently became his girlfriend.
[1] In September 2010, Chan, now a medical student, moved into Zuckerberg's rented Palo Alto house.
[1] Zuckerberg studies
Mandarin Chinese every day, and the couple visited
China in December 2010.
[15][16] As of 2010, Facebook is blocked by that country's
Internet firewall.
[17]On Zuckerberg's Facebook page, he listed his personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism".
[18] Zuckerberg sees blue best because of
red–green colorblindness; blue is also Facebook's dominant color.
[19]Software developer
Early years
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software as a child in
middle school. His father taught him
Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him a "prodigy," adding that it was "tough to stay ahead of him." Zuckerberg also took a graduate course in the subject at
Mercy College near his home while he was still in high school.
[1] He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In one such program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet," which allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate by pinging each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of
AOL's
Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.
[1]According to writer
Jose Antonio Vargas, "some kids played computer games. Mark created them."
[1] Zuckerberg himself recalls this period: "I had a bunch of friends who were artists. They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." However, notes Vargas, Zuckerberg was not a typical "geek-klutz," as he later became captain of his high school
fencing team and earned his diploma in
classical literature.
[1]Napster founder
Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff,” recalling how he once quoted lines from the Latin epic poem
Aeneid, by
Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.
[1]During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used
artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to
Slashdot[20] and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from
PC Magazine.
[21] Microsoft and
AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at
Harvard College in September 2002.
Harvard years
By the time he began classes at Harvard, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy," notes Vargas. He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to
Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity.
[8][1][22] In his sophomore year, he wrote a program he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best looking person from a choice of photos. According to Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, Arie Hasit, "he built the site for fun." Hasit explains:
We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures, or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking.
[23]
The site went up over the weekend, but by Monday morning the college shut it down because its popularity had overwhelmed Harvard's server and prevented students from accessing the web. In addition, many students complained that their photos were being used without permission. Zuckerberg apologized publicly, and the student paper ran articles stating that his site was "completely improper."
At the time of Zuckerberg's "fun" site, however, students had already been requesting that the university develop a web site that would include similar photos and contact details to be part of the college's computer network. According to Hasit, "Mark heard these pleas and decided that if the university won't do something about it, he will, and he would build a site that would be even better than what the university had planned."
[23]Facebook
Founding and goals
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004.
[24][25] An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from
Phillips Exeter Academy, the private high school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book" (once known as the "E Book"), but which students referred to as "The Facebook." Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their proximities to friends, and their telephone numbers.
[24]Zuckerberg moved to
Palo Alto,
California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met
Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard but eventually decided to remain in California.
[attribution needed] They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy out Facebook. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning:
It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by
conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.
[25]
He restated these same goals to
Wired magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open."
[29] Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of former
Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing strategies for Facebook.
[30]On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark.
[31] When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained:
I guess we could ... If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average
search query. The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... That’s the simplest thing we could do. But we aren’t like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.
[29]
In 2010,
Stephen Levy, who authored the 1984 book
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a
hacker."
[32] Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better."
[32][33] Facebook instituted "
hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project.
[32] The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended.
[33] "The idea is that you can build something really good in a night", Zuckerberg told Levy. "And that's part of the personality of Facebook now ... It's definitely very core to my personality."
[32]Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age".
[34]Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the
Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009.
[35] In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in
New Statesman's annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.
[36] Wirehog
A month after Facebook launched in February 2004,
i2hub, another campus-only service, created by
Wayne Chang, was launched. i2hub focused on
peer-to-peer file sharing. At the time, both i2hub and Facebook were gaining the attention of the press and growing rapidly in users and publicity. In August 2004, Zuckerberg,
Andrew McCollum,
Adam D'Angelo, and
Sean Parker launched a competing peer-to-peer file sharing service called
Wirehog. It was a precursor to
Facebook Platform applications. Traction was low compared to i2hub, and Facebook ultimately shut Wirehog down the following summer.
[37][38]Platform and Beacon
On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced
Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. It grew to more than 800,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platform. On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced
Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform for users.
On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising system called Beacon, which enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites. For example,
eBay sellers could let friends know automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list items for sale. The program came under scrutiny because of privacy concerns from groups and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg wrote a blog post on Facebook
[39] taking responsibility for the concerns about Beacon and offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.
Legal controversies
ConnectU lawsuits
Harvard students
Cameron Winklevoss,
Tyler Winklevoss, and
Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of intentionally making them believe he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called
ConnectU).
[40] They filed a lawsuit in 2004 but it was dismissed on a technicality on March 28, 2007. It was refiled soon thereafter in
federal court in
Boston. Facebook countersued in regards to Social Butterfly, a project put out by
The Winklevoss Chang Group, an alleged partnership between ConnectU and
i2hub. On June 25, 2008, the case settled and Facebook agreed to transfer over 1.2 million common shares and pay $20 million in cash.
[41]In November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of
02138, a magazine that catered to Harvard alumni. They included Zuckerberg's social security number, his parents' home address, and his girlfriend's address. Facebook filed to have the documents removed, but the judge ruled in favor of
02138.
[42]Pakistan criminal investigation
In June 2010, Deputy Attorney General Muhammad Azhar Sidiqque of the
Islamic Republic of
Pakistan launched a criminal investigation into Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founders
Dustin Moskovitz and
Chris Hughes after a "
Draw Muhammad" contest was hosted on Facebook. The investigation also named the anonymous German woman who created the contest. Sidiqque asked the country's police to contact
Interpol to have Zuckerberg and the three others arrested for
blasphemy. On May 19, 2010, Facebook's website was temporarily blocked in Pakistan until Facebook removed the contest from its website at the end of May. Sidiqque also asked its
United Nations representative to raise the issue with the
United Nations General Assembly.
[43][44]Paul Ceglia
Main article:
Paul CegliaOn June 30, 2010, Paul Ceglia, the owner of a
wood pellet fuel company in
Allegany County, upstate New York, filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, claiming 84% ownership of Facebook and seeking monetary damages. According to Ceglia, he and Zuckerberg signed a contract on April 28, 2003 that for an initial fee of $1,000 entitled Ceglia to 50% of the website's revenue, as well as an additional 1% interest in the business per day after January 1, 2004, until website completion. Zuckerberg was developing other projects at the time, among which was
Facemash, the predecessor of Facebook, but did not register the domain name
thefacebook.com until January 1, 2004. Facebook management dismissed the lawsuit as "completely frivolous". Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told a reporter that Ceglia's counsel had unsuccessfully sought an out-of-court settlement.
[45] In an interview with
ABC World News, Zuckerberg stated he was confident he had never signed such an agreement. At the time, Zuckerberg worked for Ceglia as a code developer on a project named "StreetFax". Judge Thomas Brown issued a
restraining order on all financial transfers concerning ownership of Facebook until further notice; in response, Facebook
removed the case to
federal court and asked that the state court injunction be dissolved. According to Facebook, the injunction would not affect their business and lacked any legal basis.
[46][47][48][49][50][51]Depictions in media
The Social Network
A movie based on Zuckerberg and the founding years of
Facebook, called
The Social Network, was released on October 1, 2010, and stars
Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. After Zuckerberg was told about the film, he responded, "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive."
[52] Also, after the film's script was leaked on the
Internet and it was apparent that the film would not portray Zuckerberg in a wholly positive light, he stated that he wanted to establish himself as a "good guy".
[53]The Social Network is based on the book
The Accidental Billionaires by
Ben Mezrich, which the book's publicist once described as "big juicy fun" rather than "reportage."
[54] The film's screenwriter
Aaron Sorkin told
New York magazine, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling", adding, "What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy's sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?"
[55] Disputed accuracy
Author Jeff Jarvis, of the forthcoming book
Public Parts, interviewed Zuckerberg and believes Sorkin has made too much of the story up. He states, "That's what the internet is accused of doing, making stuff up, not caring about the facts."
[56]According to David Kirkpatrick, the author of
The Facebook Effect:The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World,[57]"the film is only "40% true. . . he is not snide and sarcastic in a cruel way, the way Zuckerberg is played in the movie." He says that "a lot of the factual incidents are accurate, but many are distorted and the overall impression is false," and concludes that primarily "his motivations were to try and come up with a new way to share information on the internet."
[56]Although the film portrays Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook in order to elevate his stature after not getting into any of the elite
final clubs at
Harvard, Zuckerberg himself said he had no interest in joining the final clubs.
[1] Kirkpatrick agrees that the impression implied by the film is "false."
[56]Karel Baloun, a former senior engineer at Facebook, notes that the "image of Zuckerberg as a socially inept nerd is overstated . . .It is fiction. . ." He likewise dismisses the film's assertion that he "would deliberately betray a friend."
[56]Other depictions
Zuckerberg voiced himself on an episode of
The Simpsons, "
Loan-a Lisa", which first aired on October 3, 2010. In the episode,
Lisa Simpsonand her friend Nelson encounter Zuckerberg at an entrepreneurs' convention. Zuckerberg tells Lisa that you don't need to graduate from college to be wildly successful referencing
Bill Gates and
Richard Branson as examples.
[58]Zuckerberg authorized an account of his and Facebook's life written by David Kirkpatrick, the former technology editor at
Fortune magazine, which came out in 2010, entitled
The Facebook Effect.[61]Philanthropy
Zuckerberg donated an undisclosed amount to
Diaspora, an open-source personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. He called it a "cool idea."
[29]Zuckerberg founded the Start-up: Education foundation.
[62][63] On September 22, 2010, it was reported that Zuckerberg had arranged to donate $100 million to
Newark Public Schools, the public school system of
Newark, New Jersey.
[64][65] Critics noted the timing of the donation as being close to the release of
The Social Network, which painted a somewhat negative portrait of Zuckerberg.
[66][67] Zuckerberg responded to the criticism, saying, "The thing that I was most sensitive about with the movie timing was, I didn’t want the press about 'The Social Network' movie to get conflated with the Newark project. I was thinking about doing this anonymously just so that the two things could be kept separate."
[66] Newark Mayor
Cory A. Booker stated that he and New Jersey Governor
Chris Christie had to convince Zuckerberg's team not to make the donation anonymously.
[66]
On December 8, 2010, Zuckerberg released a statement that he had become a signatory of
The Giving Pledge
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