Mark Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Facebook. His net worth is estimated to be US $53.6 billion as of 2017, ranking him the 5th richest person in the world.
Let’s see some interesting facts about her!
1. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York.
2. He is the son of dentist Edward Zuckerberg and psychiatrist Karen Kempner.
3. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a small Westchester County village about 21 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
4. Zuckerberg was raised Jewish and had his bar mitzvah when he turned 13.
5. At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes. He transferred to the exclusive private school Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, in his junior year, where he won prizes in science (math, astronomy, and physics) and classical studies.
6. On his college application, Zuckerberg claimed that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team.
7. Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school.
8. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately.
9. Newman calls him a “prodigy”, adding that it was “tough to stay ahead of him”. Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school.
10. He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In one program, since his father’s dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called “ZuckNet” that allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with each other.
11. It is considered a “primitive” version of AOL’s Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.
12. Napster co-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 Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.
13. 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 machine learning to learn the user’s listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.
14. He was approached by several companies with job offers (including AOL and Microsoft) before he even graduated high school, but Zuckerberg turned them all down.
15. Zuckerberg first launched Facebook from his dormitory at Harvard University.
16. He dropped out of Harvard University after his sophomore year to continue working on Facebook.
17. A movie was made about Zuckerberg and the birth of Facebook, called The Social Network.
18. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, “The Photo Address Book”, which students referred to as “The Facebook”.
19. 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 friends, and their telephone numbers.
20. Once at college, Zuckerberg’s Facebook started off as just a “Harvard thing” until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz.
21. They began with Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, Brown, and Yale.
22. After Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California with Moskovitz and some friends, they leased a small house that served as an office.
23. 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.
24. He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010: “The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.”
25. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark.
26. Facebook instituted “hackathons” held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project. The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended.
27. Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 “most influential people of the Information Age”.
28. Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009.[46] In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman’s annual survey of the world’s 50 most influential figures.
29. In a 2011 interview with PBS after the death of Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg said that Jobs had advised him on how to create a management team at Facebook that was “focused on building as high quality and good things as you are”.
30. On October 1, 2012, Zuckerberg visited Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook’s position in the Russian market.
31. In 2012, Facebook had roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic clone VK had around 34 million. Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook’s head of consumer marketing, claimed that 85 million American Facebook users were exposed to the first day of the Home promotional campaign on April 6, 2013.[51]
32. On August 19, 2013, the Washington Post reported that Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile was hacked by an unemployed web developer.
33. At the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, held in September, Zuckerberg stated that he is working towards registering the 5 billion humans who were not connected to the Internet as of the conference on Facebook.
34. Zuckerberg was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2014, which was attended by 75,000 delegates.
35. Zuckerberg’s speech expands upon the goal that he raised at the TechCrunch conference in September 2013, whereby he is working towards expanding Internet coverage into developing countries.
36. Alongside other American technology figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, Zuckerberg hosted visiting Chinese politician Lu Wei, known as the “Internet czar” for his influence in the enforcement of China’s online policy, at Facebook’s headquarters on December 8, 2014.
36. Zuckerberg fielded questions during a live Q&A session at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park on December 11, 2014.
37. Zuckerberg receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. On December 3, 2016 Forbes reported Facebook shares have declined 7% since November 8, 2016, reducing Zuckerberg’s net worth by 3.7 billion dollars.
38. Zuckerberg has supported numerous philanthropic causes, most famously donating $100 million to rescue the struggling Newark Public Schools system of New Jersey.
39. Zuckerberg has signed the “Giving Pledge” commitment, promising to donate at least 50% of his wealth over the course of his lifetime.
40. In 2014, Zuckerberg donated $25 million to combat the ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.
41. Zuckerberg met his future wife, fellow student Priscilla Chan, at a fraternity party during his sophomore year at Harvard. They began dating in 2003.
42. In September 2010, Zuckerberg invited Chan, by then a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, to move into his rented Palo Alto house.
43. Zuckerberg studied Mandarin in preparation for the couple’s visit to China in December 2010.
44. On May 19, 2012, Zuckerberg and Chan married in Zuckerberg’s backyard in an event that also celebrated her graduation from medical school.
45. On July 31, 2015, Zuckerberg announced that he and Chan were expecting a baby girl. He said he felt confident that the risk of miscarrying was low so far into the pregnancy, after Chan had already suffered three miscarriages.
46. On December 1, Zuckerberg announced the birth of his first child, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg (“Max”).
47. Τhe couple announced on their Chinese New Year video, published on February 6, 2016, that Maxima’s official Chinese name is Chen Mingyu (Chinese: 陈明宇).
48. While raised Jewish, Zuckerberg later identfied as an atheist, a position he has since renounced.
49. He has shown an appreciation for Buddhism.
50. With regard to Christianity, both Zuckerberg and his wife told Pope Francis in August 2016 “how much we admire his message of mercy and tenderness, and how he’s found new ways to communicate with people of every faith around the world.”
51. In December 2016, when asked “Aren’t you an atheist?” in response to a Christmas Day post on Facebook, Zuckerberg responded, “No. I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.”
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