Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur . He is best known as one of five co-founders of the social networking website Facebook. Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of Facebook, Inc. His personal wealth, as of July 2015, is estimated to be $38.6 billion . Zuckerberg receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook.
Together with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin , Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz , and Chris Hughes , he launched Facebook from Harvard University ‘s dormitory rooms. The group then introduced Facebook onto other campuses nationwide and moved to Palo Alto, California shortly afterwards. In 2007, at the age of 23, Zuckerberg became a billionaire as a result of
Facebook’s success.
Early life
Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in White Plains, New York . He is the son of dentist Edward Zuckerberg and psychiatrist Karen Kempner. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a small Westchester County village about 10 miles (16 km) north of New York City. Zuckerberg was raised Jewish and had his bar mitzvah when he turned 13. [Afterward, he became an atheist.
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately.
By the time he began classes at Harvard, Zuckerberg had already achieved a “reputation as a programming prodigy”, notes Vargas. He studied psychology and computer science as well as belonging to Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, and Kirkland House.
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.
The site went up over a weekend; but by Monday morning, the college shut it down because its popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard’s network switches and prevented students from accessing the Internet. 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.” The following semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, originally located at
thefacebook.com.
Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra , accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to the
Harvard Crimson and the newspaper began an investigation in response.
Following the official launch of the Facebook social media platform, the three filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg that resulted in a settlement. The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares that were worth US$300 million at Facebook’s IPO. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to complete his project.
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. 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”. 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.
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 . They began with Columbia, New York University , Stanford , Dartmouth , Cornell , Penn , Brown , and Yale .
The other success stories of Facebook can only be imagined.
Hard work pays, my friends. Go out there and work your socks off.
Source: Wikipedia
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