Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook Founder: The Youngest Billionare in the World

Mark E. Zuckerman was born on May 14th, 1984 in White Plains, NY. Both of his parents are doctors. His mother is a psychiatrist and his father is a dentist. He has three sisters. Raised in the Jewish faith, he considers himself an atheist. An American computer programmer, he attended Harvard University. He is best known for creating the social networking program Facebook, for which a film was produced. In 2011, his estimated worth was $17.5 billion dollars.

He was a Harvard student when he created the world famous popular Facebook, but his interest in computers started long before.

Early Attempts at Programming
In the 1990s his father saw his potential, and began teaching him Atari Basic Programming. His father arranged for a tutor, David Newman to teach him. His tutor called him a “prodigy“and admitted it was hard to keep up with his gifted teenaged pupil. Simultaneously, while Mark attended high school, he attended a graduate level programming class at Mercy College. In his spare time, he created a primitive version of AOL Messenger that he named “ZuckNet“ which was intended to help his father in his dental business which he ran from home. The program enabled all the computers in the house and office to communicate by pinging with each other on the internet. Programming was child’s play to him. If his friends had an idea, he would turn it into a game.
In 2001, Mark fiddled around with many new programs, most notably a music listening one. By employing artificial intelligence which measured the listener’s favored music choices, the Synapse program would create a new, relevant play list. Submitting it into a contest, he earned a 3 of 5 from PC Magazine, attracting both the interest and subsequent job offers from notable giants Microsoft and AOL, who wanted to buy Synapse. Turning them down, he went to Harvard in 2002 instead.

Mark the Programmer
Mark doesn’t fit the geeky computer programming nerd stereotype. In high school, he majored in the classics and can speak French, Hebrew, ancient Greek and Latin. A lover of Greek philosophy, he was known in college for quoting lines from epic Greek classics like the Iliad by Homer. He was also a champion fencer and the captain of the fencing team. Mark was always the kind of guy with lots of friends, not a geeky nerd stereotype that some computer programmers get to live up to.

Harvard days
Mark had the reputation of being a programming prodigy. The social network Facebook began completely by accident. At Harvard there is a student directory called the Face Book. It contains a photo of each student and some basic information.

Before long, he became known on campus for being a programming prodigy. Just for fun he started putting together a rating game with two college photos asking students to select who was the hotter of the two. Called Face mash, it caused the Harvard internet system to overload and student complained that their photos were being used without their permission. Even though he later apologized for the action, students began requesting that something similar be set up online to be able to share photos and personal information. Mark then decided that he would do it, if the University wouldn’t – and that it would be better than anyone could have imagined it would be.

Mark is technically colorblind, which means the entrepreneur can’t see red or green. Of all the colors, he can see blue the best, which is the most dominant color of Facebook.
Facebook was launched on 4 Feb 2004. At first, it was just a Harvard thing. People could look up their friends; send messages, share info and chat. Then other universities got in on it. With the help of his friend and roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Penn, Brown and Yale joined the Facebook network. Facebook’s first investor was Peter Thiel in 2004, and soon offers came in from major corporations to buy Facebook from Mark Zucherberg.
Regarding the interest in his program, the corporate offers coming in to buy out Facebook, Mark declined. “It’s not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.”
He believes that it’s OK to break things in order to make them better. He also considers himself a hacker. In July 2010, Facebook reached the 500 million user mark. The potential in ad revenue if they were to double advertising space could phenomenally impact the company further, but Mark disagrees. “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. “
Zuckerberg was named number 1 on Vanity Fair magazine’s 2010 list of the Top 100 “most influential people of the Information Age”. A year earlier, Mark Zuckerberg was also on the list, but on the 23rd position. In 2010, Zuckerberg was the 16th most influential person as chosen on the annual survey of New Statesman’s global top 50 most influential figures.
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,” in a 2011 PBS interview with after the untimely death of Steve Jobs, creator of Apple.
Four years before, Zuckerberg had been named to the MIT Technology Review in 2007 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
The Social Network was a movie produced with Mark Zuckerman’s fabulous success story as its basis. It unnerved him a little to have a movie made after him, saying, “I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive.“ His role was played by Jesse Eisenberg, and was not portrayed in a wholly positive light. Later, when the two men met, and Jesse asked what he had thought of the movie Social Network, Zuckerberg said “I thought it was interesting.” Jesse commented that “Mark has been so gracious about something…that, I think, could otherwise be very uncomfortable.”
Zuckerberg had made an arrangement in September 2010 to donate $100 million to the Newark Public Schools system. Some were critical of this decision, saying that the timing of the donation was close to the film release of The Social Network, painting a somewhat negative image of Zuckerberg. The Facebook mogul 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.“ According to both Newark’s mayor and New York state governor Chris Christie, they had to work hard to convince Mark Zuckerberg to not make the donation anonymously.
In December 2010, Zuckerberg joined forces with several ultra wealthy men: Warren Buffett and Billl Gates, for example, to donate to charity at least half of their income. Called “The Giving Pledge”, the group invited other wealthy tycoons to donate 50% or more of their wealthy to charity.