He earned $74 billion. He is the fifth richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. However, he has no desire to show off, especially when it comes to cars, clothes and travel.
Membership in philanthropic campaigns such as the Giving Pledge and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative obliges the Harvard student to devote most of his wealth to charitable causes.
What else does the couple spend their billions on?
In May 2012, eight years after the company was founded, Facebook debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time, it was the largest technology IPO in history. Since then, Zuckerberg's fortune has increased by an average of $9 billion annually.
Despite his status as one of the richest tech tycoons, the billionaire, who lives with his wife Priscilla and their two daughters, leads a fairly low-key lifestyle.
Like many other residents of Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg. Despite the businessman’s love for casual style, his signature gray T-shirts and sweatshirts are designed by famous brands. They are reported to be much more expensive than they look. Sometimes the price tag is hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Zuckerberg is known for choosing relatively inexpensive cars. He was seen driving an Acura TSX, a Volkswagen hatchback and a Honda Fit. All these cars cost no more than $30 thousand.
However, Zuckerberg willingly spends money on real estate. In May 2011, he bought a house in Palo Alto for $7 million with an area of 1,500 square meters. He later added "custom made" to it. The following year, he real estate around his home, spending more than $30 million on four mansions. Zuckerberg plans to reconstruct these houses, adapting them to his taste.
He also owns a townhouse in the Mission District, San Francisco. He bought the 1,600 square meter house in 2013 and began renovating it. Landscaping the greenhouse, redesigning the kitchen and other work cost him more than $1 million.
The costs are likely to be even higher this year as Zuckerberg spends the summer traveling from state to state. As part of his tour, the CEO dined with family in Ohio, met with former drug addicts, worked on a Ford assembly line, met with military personnel and even fed a calf.
All these moments were documented by a photographer who accompanied Zuckerberg during his trip.
Zuckerberg has complete control over Facebook's future through his shares, which carry exclusive voting rights. Facebook's share price has risen 50% since April 2016, and Zuckerberg said he plans to speed up the sale of shares to finance
7 min. reading
Updated: 01/10/2017
If you look at the top ten richest people in the world according to Forbes for 2013, you will see that for the most part these are elderly, experienced people who are over 70 years old.
– 74 years old, – 83 years old, Amancio Ortega – 78 years old, Charles Koch – 78 years old, etc. Well, it turns out like in the song “my years are my wealth”? And financial success does not come to those who have not “grown” to the required degree of business experience and life wisdom?
The exception among wealthy people is those whose wealth is greater than their age. He has not yet reached his retirement years, but ranks 2nd in the ranking of the richest (58 years old and a fortune of 67 billion dollars). It’s not in vain that we remembered the legendary founder of the corporation, because journalists strive to compare our today’s hero, Mark Zuckerberg, with him.
And if Bill Gates became a billionaire at 31, then Mark - at 22! And although Zuckerberg’s fortune is 19 billion dollars, and Gates’s is 67, Mark’s age is half that of Bill’s - only 29 years. Zuckerberg also ranks 3rd on the list of the most influential businessmen in the world in 2013.
Who is he, after all?
Meet Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the world's largest social network, Facebook. Haven't you heard of this? Are the sites Twitter, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki familiar to you? Even if you don’t like to spend your free time on online communication, you’ve probably heard about them. All of these sites were created in 2006, 2 years after Zuckerberg's brainchild. And although Facebook was not the first social network in the world, it was the one that became a real breakthrough.
More than 1.4 billion accounts are registered on Facebook (for comparison, VKontakte has 228 million users). This figure can be comparable to the world population in the 17th century! And if we talk about our time, then among the 7 billion people living on the planet, about 20% of people are Facebook users.
The scale is impressive. It seems Zuckerberg's dream is starting to come true: “The thing that really excites me is fulfilling the mission of creating an open society.”
For the fact that Zuckerberg created “a new system of information sharing and changed lives”, he receives the title “Person of the Year 2010” from Time magazine.
The slogan “liberty, equality and fraternity” is certainly a good one. But let’s not forget about the other side of this noble idea - profits. Mark's invention brought him fabulous income and the title of the youngest billionaire in the history of mankind!
After all, people registering for Facebook, represent a huge database. Most large companies in the US, Europe and Asia have their virtual representation on Facebook, and every 4th advertisement posted on social networks is from Zuckerberg’s company. Facebook's net profit for 2013 was $1.5 billion.
How can we not quote Mark himself? “The older I get, the more convinced I am that servicing voyeurs is the best way to make money.”
I remember an online joke: “In connection with the emergence Facebook-a, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, psychologists intend to exclude exhibitionism from the list of perversions.”
In 2006, Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook for $750 million and was right – by 2014, the social network’s market value had increased to 150 billion!
Mark's biography will be short. He has not yet lived a long life full of ups and downs, and therefore he will boast not about the quantity, but about the quality of the past years.
What helped a boy from an intelligent Jewish family achieve worldwide fame?
Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York. Mark was the only heir, but he had three sisters. The family was quite wealthy, Mark’s dad worked as a dentist, and his mother was a psychiatrist. It is no secret that in the United States these professions are among the most paid.
At the age of 10, his parents gave Mark his first computer - a Quantex 486DX with an Intel 486 processor. Young Mark decided to take it up as an adult and began reading special books on programming.
Science came easily to him; the teenager enjoys inventing various programs, such as, for example, a computer version of the strategic board game “Risk.”
For his own entertainment, Mark develops the Synapse program, which is a self-learning music player. Synapse independently generated a list of tracks, having previously remembered what kind of music a music lover prefers and at what time of day.
The story with Synapse is notable because Zuckerberg refused Microsoft, which offered the teenager to buy his development. Mark was also not interested in the invitation to cooperate from this largest corporation. Later, he simply released Synapse to the public domain. Perhaps he was already guided by his credo?
“If a person has brains, he simply does not have the moral right to work not for himself, giving most of his time and the results of his achievements to his employer”
I understand that after these words, people working “for their uncle” will not immediately sign a letter of resignation. But let this idea make you think about at least creating your own additional source of income.
Our hero was not a typical “nerd” who spent the best years of his life in front of a monitor. His parents tried to raise a harmonious personality, developed in all respects, and they succeeded. Modern parents should not let their children's passion for computers take its course, but should encourage them to engage in physical education so that the child does not suffer from scoliosis or myopia.
Mark was actively involved in sports and was an excellent fencer. In addition to good performance in mathematics and natural subjects, foreign languages were also easy for him. Now Zuckerberg can read French, Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew, and recently learned Chinese, because his wife has Chinese roots.
They say that it was at the prestigious private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where Mark studied, that the idea of creating Facebook was born. At school, new students were given a directory containing photographs and coordinates of all classmates. It was this that schoolchildren called “The Facebook,” literally “The Book of Faces.”
After school, Mark continues his education at Harvard with a degree in psychology. Success always follows on the heels of those who follow unbeaten paths. For the art history exam, Mark had to study half a thousand paintings, and there were only 2 days left before the session.
Zuckerberg took an unconventional approach - he created a website on which he displayed these 500 paintings and asked fellow students to describe them. After 2 hours, each picture was overgrown with comments from students, which helped our innovator get a pass.
For the creation of another site - Facemash - Mark was punished by the Harvard administration. All the student did was hack into the university’s computer network, and, taking photos from there, posted them in pairs on his website.
The site worked on the “hot or not” principle, i.e. “hot thing” or “not”, and invited everyone to comment on the attractiveness of the characters. The result of Facemash’s 2-hour work was 500 visitors, and soon the server crashed due to the number of thousands of users.
The site was closed, and Mark was accused of hacking and invasion of privacy. The charges, however, were dropped, and Mark saw that the simple idea of comparing photos worked well. And I seriously thought about creating a social network.
Facebook celebrates its birthday on February 4, 2004. In addition to Zuckerberg, his fellow students, Eduardo Severin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Christopher Hughes, also worked on the creation of the site.
The opening of the project was accompanied by a scandal. A week after its launch, undergraduate students, the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra, accuse Zuckerberg of stealing the idea.
In 2003, Mark was hired by them to complete the creation of the social network HarvardConnection.com. According to them, Zuckerberg did not give them the results of his work, but he used the results to open his website. Mark denies the accusations and says that he embodied an idea that was “flying in the air.”
He is convinced that a person “Whoever makes a comfortable chair should not pay everyone who makes the chairs.” However, in 2009, Zuckerberg had to pay his opponents $45 million to settle the case that went to trial.
Who knows how much truth there is in these accusations, but the proverb “winners are not judged” is still in use among the people. In response to all the speeches of spiteful critics, Zuckerberg replies: “You can’t make 500 million friends without making a single enemy.”
Facebook was originally developed for Harvard students to communicate. It was loved for the ease of finding information and the availability of photos, and soon the site united students from other universities. Since 2006, Facebook has been opened to all users over 13 years of age.
Mark invested all the money his parents raised for his studies into his new project, but the rapidly growing business required additional cash injections. Zuckerberg goes to Silicon Valley to find investors for Facebook. The energetic guy is lucky - on the street he accidentally meets Sean Parker, co-founder of the file-sharing network Napster.
He, in turn, introduces him to Peter Thiel, co-founder of online payments PayPal. Peter immediately spotted a gold mine and invested half a million dollars in Mark’s project. Zuckerberg is no longer returning to Harvard.
The Facebook team rents space in Palo Alto, one of the cities in Silicon Valley. Mark knew how to understand personnel: “We acquired talent, which, for me, is one of the best things that could be done.” Now, for example, the management of current operations is not managed by Mark himself, but by an experienced manager from Google. The company's staff is working hard to ensure that the site "does not allow you to move away from the monitor."
At the company, Mark maintains the image of an eccentric billionaire. Somewhere he really is like that, somewhere he plays along, because according to the reviews of his partners (by the way, most of them purchased the “ex” prefixes), he is not as simple as he seems.
These famous “pajama” negotiations, when Mark discusses serious topics in carelessly wrinkled clothes and flip-flops on his bare feet! And the answer to the Microsoft representative’s offer to meet at 8 am and discuss business cooperation was “I can’t come, I’m still sleeping at this time”! And Mark’s refusal to meet with Yahoo’s authorized representative because “a girl is coming to see me.” Somehow all this looks like a polite “fuck you”... Our bastard designs his business cards even cooler - the inscription on them reads “I’m the director here, bitch!”
Well, the rich Generation Next have their own quirks. Remember ours, who explains his quirks primarily by the desire to stand out from the crowd. Mark's are not so strange - the guy still loves to walk and ride a bike.
Mark celebrated his wedding with his beloved girlfriend Priscilla Chen not on an exotic island, like, and not in a luxurious mansion, entirely decorated with fresh flowers, like. Relatives and friends, supposedly invited to Priscilla's graduation party, suddenly discovered that they were at a wedding ceremony!
Mark Zuckerberg, a guy from a simple Jewish family, will celebrate his 33rd birthday in May 2017. Fortune favors the brave - Mark Zuckerberg posted this statement from the ancient Roman poet Virgil on his Facebook page. Although he was never brave, rather stubborn. And luck was not always on his side. But everything turned out just fine: today more than a billion people use the social network Facebook. And its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, is reaping the fruits of his labor at the top of Olympus along with other multi-rich people.
Most likely, he will be welcoming guests for his birthday at a luxurious home in California. And the billion likes received on this day will be able to be invested in a new project. Mark Zuckerberg today is very interested in the prospects of transmitting thoughts using mobile devices.
The extraordinary talent of Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot is the only son of the Zuckerberg couple. He was born on May 14, 1984 in a suburb of New York. His father Edward is a practicing dentist, Karen is a housewife (a psychiatrist by profession). They raised four children: Mark has an older sister and two younger ones. The father of a world-famous son loves to share his memories with the public and give advice on the proper upbringing and development of talents in children.
He believes that he influenced his son by his example: he worked hard to provide for his family, maintained an interest in programming, first teaching himself the basics of algorithmic languages, and then paying for the services of a tutor. At the age of 10, he gave Mark a computer. He used it to practice writing messaging programs. He even installed one of these at home and at his father’s work. He actively used it together with his assistants.
The young programmer posted one of his developments on one of the sites dedicated to new products in the IT industry. It formed users' musical preferences into a playlist and was called Synapse. Microsoft showed interest in her, offering the student a good price for this work (almost $2 million) and inviting him to work. But the guy refused, saying that he was not ready to sell his inspiration.
Despite the main passion of his life, Mark Zuckerberg, after graduating from the prestigious private school Phillips Exeter Academy, goes to Harvard to study psychology. But he shows himself there too, having written several programs for students with access to a local network. One of them - Facemash - will become the prototype of his main masterpiece, the social network Facebook. He is 19 years old and has his first success with 20 thousand fellow students, who are happy to rank the most attractive students based on photos. Unprecedented popularity almost cost the modest young man his student card. The fact is that he hacked the university database to get all these photos. He had to apologize and remove the program from the network. He will abandon his hacking skills, but sometimes he will still be forced to use them.
Mark Zuckerberg's goldmine
Zuckerberg's popularity at Harvard played a role. Students Divya Nerenda and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss turn to him for help and tell him that they have been working for a year to create the ConnectU dating site. But without a smart programmer, they can’t pull off this project, so they invite Mark to their team. They argue passionately for several months, but the newcomer does not see the potential in his partners and assembles another team. By this time, he had a complete picture of the future site in his head, the name TheFacebook.com and a quartet of partners - Saverin (commercial director), Moskowitz (programmer), McCollum (artist) and Hughes (developer and press attaché). They were promoting the site and looking for investors.
Peter Thiel was the first to believe in the success of the business; he bought 10.2 percent of the shares for half a million dollars. Now he is a billionaire (like the rest of the four), he has five million shares and membership on the board of directors of Facebook.
In early 2004, the first people to see Facebook will be their fellow students, but students from other universities will soon join them. ConnectU, which did see the light of day, never became popular among young people, unlike Facebook. Several thousand users immediately subscribed to it. Zuckerberg rejoiced: the Facebook service is simple and convenient, thanks to it, young people could easily make acquaintances and arrange dates. And his former partners were preparing a lawsuit, accusing him of stealing the idea.
The proceedings lasted four years, various examinations were carried out, but the intellectual property of the program codes on which Facebook was built remained unclear.
The legal battle ended in 2008 with a settlement agreement and good compensation: the creator of the social network paid $20 million in shares and cash. By this time, Mark Zuckerberg could afford it: Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook shares. And the whole company came closer to a value of $15 billion. The number of users grew at an incredible speed and expanded beyond the United States.
The company has capitalized by leaps and bounds.
Before one judicial scandal had time to subside, another broke out. At that time, Eduardo Saverin presented his claims to the founder of Facebook. He worked briefly as a commercial director on the project, went to practice, and Mark Zuckerberg quickly found a replacement for him: Sean Parker. Saverin's share melted from thirty to some hundredths of percent, and he went to court. In 2009, a decision was made on Saverin’s right to five percent of the company’s shares worth $1 billion, and in another five years he will become one of the top young billionaires.
Silicon Valley
The successful monetization of the Facebook site in three years brought its creator not only into the pool of rich people, but also allowed him to improve the product. In 2009, Mark Zuckerberg met the influential co-owner of Mail.ru Group, Yuri Borisovich Milner. The acquaintance took place in Palo Alto, where Zuckerberg’s company also found refuge in Silicon Valley.
The meeting ended with the signing of an agreement on the acquisition by the Russian Internet giant of a small stake (1.96%) of Facebook for $200 million. By this time, the number of Russian-speaking Facebook users in Russia has been increasing for a year and the “Varyag” is confidently going to overtake another popular network LiveJournal.
And with that deal in Palo Alto, other large corporations will begin pouring into the social network. In 2010, a film “The Social Network” will be made about the 26-year-old guy and his successful project, in which none of the company’s founders will take part. The film will be watched by millions of viewers, and it will receive a number of prestigious cinematic awards.
Mark Zuckerberg will also watch this film, and later he will say that it has little in common with real events. Unless the T-shirts in which the main character appears on the screen will remind him of his own.
In 2012, the billionth user will subscribe to Facebook. In another three years, Facebook will be named the second most visited site.
There is room for improvement
He knows Chinese well because his wife is Chinese. And the blue color he chose for the Facebook site is pleasing to his eyes like no other, because he is colorblind. He went on maternity leave and devoted all his time to raising his long-awaited daughter Max. There are various rumors about Mark Zuckerberg and many of them are true.
He is open to communication and does not shy away from publicity. She posts family photos and videos on Facebook, shares news and responds to comments. His one-year-old Max’s first steps, trips around the country, and impressions of meeting people were seen by millions of people. Mark, who had always been known as secretive, suddenly stopped being so. Rumor has it that he is going into big-time politics and is aiming for the White House. Surely his wife Priscilla Chan will like this idea. Their dreams generally always came true: success, wealth, home, children - nothing came easy, but it’s all there. It's time to share.
In the year of his daughter’s birth, Mark Zuckerberg announced his entry into the Pledge of Giving alliance, a charitable organization in which tycoons Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others are seen. He had been an active philanthropist before, but now he decided to play big. His announcement of his intention to donate not 50 percent of the capital like his senior colleagues, but 99% of his shares in Facebook caused another wave of discussions. Some are touched by his generosity, others are looking for mercantile interest. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which will distribute the funds.
Everything is fine in his corporation: last year the profit was $22 billion. 1.8 billion people are registered on the Facebook website. The company is worth $375 billion, and its founder is one of the eight richest people on the planet.
He intends to devote this year to traveling around America and thinking about how to bring to life his next fantasy, which the team is already puzzling over. He wants to hear thoughts using computer technology. It’s not for nothing that on the main Facebook page you see the question: what are you thinking about? Neuroimaging, according to Zuckerberg’s plan, will make it possible to answer it honestly without touching the keys.
Biography of Mark Zuckerberg, Success Story of Mark Zuckerberg
The creator of Facebook and person of the year Mark Zuckerberg, the launch of Facebook, the personal life and girlfriend of Mark Zuckerberg, the film “The Social Network”
Section 1. Mark Zuckerberg's childhood.
Section 3. Creation of Facebook.
Section 4. Claims against Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg is American programmer and entrepreneur in the field of Internet technologies, one of the developers and founders of the social network Facebook. CEO of Facebook, Inc.
Mark Zuckerberg's childhood
Businessman and co-founder of Facebook, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, into a well-educated family. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice near the family home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of her four children, Mark, Randy, Donna and Ariel.
Mark Zuckerberg showed an interest in computers at an early age, when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he called "Zucknet". His father used the program in his dental office so the receptionist could tell him when a new patient came in without having to shout across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the home. Together with his friends, Mark Zuckerberg created computer games just for fun.
To support Mark's growing interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to his home once a week and work with Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was difficult to keep up with the prodigy, who began attending graduate courses at nearby Mercy College at the same time.
Zuckerberg later attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive prep school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming captain of the school team. He also excelled in literature, graduating in classics. However, Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created the first version of the Pandora music software, which he called Synapse. Several companies, including AOL and Microsoft, have expressed interest in buying the software and hiring the teenager before he graduates from high school. Mark Zuckerberg refused the offer.
After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University. During his sophomore year at the Ivy League, he developed a reputation as a software developer on campus. It was during this time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students select their subjects based on a selection of courses from other users. He also invented Facemash, which compares photos of two female students on campus and allows users to vote on which one is more attractive. Mark Zuckerberg's program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by school officials after it was deemed inappropriate.
An extremely entertaining personality, one of the youngest enterprising and talented businessmen, ranked among the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet. Today analysts predict a cloudless and successful future for Mark.
Mark Zuckerberg is a little over twenty years old, however, today he already occupies the minds of many advanced figures in the world of business and science.
Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is the creator of one of the global technology enterprises Facebook, as well as its leader, the young businessman claims that finances and power practically do not bother him. On the contrary, he is attracted to intellectual activity, achievements in the technological field and other “smart” things.
Currently, Mark Zuckerberg owns a significant portion of the shares of the company he created, the value of which is approximately three billion dollars.
However, at one time this enterprise was just a good and promising Internet project. Today, Mark’s enterprise has grown into an extremely popular company that has already attracted a huge audience of 68 million people.
Experts never cease to puzzle over how such a young, but extremely highly developed, creature managed to achieve this phenomenon. The media's quest to learn as much as possible about Mark Zuckerberg himself is rarely successful. This is because the author of such a successful project is an extremely secretive, inaccessible person who does not want to demonstrate himself. If there are very short interviews, then in them the young and talented figure is mostly lost, stammers, stammers, in general, feels very awkward in front of the camera. However, most analysts are convinced that this state of affairs is a temporary phenomenon and very soon Mark will definitely eclipse even the most advanced speakers of our time.
And yet, sometimes Mark appears in public and tries to communicate with the media. Not long ago he spoke briefly about himself, but there was too little information. Thus, Mark is reluctant to communicate with the press. It’s a completely different matter for people close to him or colleagues. In contact with them, he is incredibly charismatic, open and sociable.
My university performance was so-so: my passion for programming took up too much of my time. Sometimes preparing for exams required extraordinary solutions, such as the case with 500 paintings in an art history course. There were two days left before the exams, and it was impossible to read anything about each painting. Zuckerberg quickly created a website, on each page of which he placed a painting, and asked fellow students to comment on the works. “After two hours,” the innovator recalls, comparing himself to Tom Sawyer, painting a fence with the help of commercial savvy, “every picture was overgrown with comments, and I passed that exam with flying colors.”
Mark Zuckerberg's girlfriend Priscilla Chan can certainly be considered one of the luckiest on the planet. Not much biographical information is known about Chan, but what we do know is that she met Zuckerberg while attending Harvard in 2004. This was the year that Mark came up with the concept of Facebook. He and his buddies, including Chan, packed up and moved to Palo Alto, California, to grow their business venture into an empire. He and his friends initially planned to return to college, but their business took off and they remained in California.
According to Forbes magazine, as of 2011, Macra Zuckerberg's net worth is estimated at approximately $13.5 billion. He lives in a modest rented house in Palo Alto, California, with his girlfriend Priscilla Chan. Mark Zuckerberg studied Chinese every day in preparation for the couple's visit to China in December 2010. In March 2011, the couple finally changed their Facebook status to "dating."
On a summer night in 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg was suffering from insomnia in his Harvard dorm room, the future Internet tycoon had been dumped by his girlfriend and was drowning his grievances with a good dose of whiskey. “In my fevered brain, the idea arose to make a site called Facemash,” Zuckerberg later recalled. “I decided to hack the Harvard information database, get out photographs of students and place the faces of sheep and cows next to each of them. And to make it funnier, I came up with a poll with the question “Which of them is sexier?” At eleven in the evening the process was in full swing, and a couple of hours later Mark launched a website with photographs of female students in pairs with a call to vote which of the two was more attractive.
Zuckerberg, of course, didn’t forget about his ex-girlfriend either: the first text entry published on his online blog was the sacramental phrase “Jessica Alona is a bitch.” After Mark's site was visited by more than twenty thousand people in a couple of hours, and the network collapsed, he appeared before Harvard's special commission on computer hacking.
Zuckerberg's drunken stunt causes predictable discontent - firstly, from the girls whose photographs were involved in the "battle of faces", and secondly, from the university administration, which was extremely outraged that Mark hacked into faculty servers to gain access to photo banks. As a result, the curly-haired botanist earned the reputation of a cynic and a seasoned programmer, and in the evening champagne was already uncorked in his room - the hero of the occasion made toasts to the success of projects related to the lives of real people.
Creation of Facebook
Based on the success of his previous projects, three of his fellow students - Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winkelvos - offered him a job, the idea was to create a social network, which they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use student information from the Harvard University network to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social network with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.
Zuckerberg and his friends created a site that allows users to create their own profiles, upload photos and communicate with other users. The group called the site Facebook, and they operated out of a Harvard University dorm room until June 2004. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself full-time to Facebook, and the company's office was moved to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.
In 2005, Zuckerberg's venture received a huge boost from Accel's venture partners. Accel invested $12.7 million in the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students. Zuckerberg's company then provided access to other colleges, schools and international schools, pushing Facebook membership to reach more than 5.5 million users in December 2005. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook began attracting interest from other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub. Unwilling to sell, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to third-party developers and adding new features.
However, in 2006, the business tycoon faced the first big barrier in his entire biography. The creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea and insisted that the software developer pay for the loss of their business. Zuckerberg claimed that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks, but then lawyers found notes from Zuckerberg that he may have intentionally stolen intellectual property and pitched Facebook as an idea to his friends.
Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. "If you're going to go to create a service that's influential and used by many, you have to be mature, right?" he told The New Yorker. "I think I've grown and learned a lot."
Although an initial settlement of US$65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute continued into 2011 after Narendra and Winkelvos claimed they were misled about the value of their shares.
“The older I get, the more convinced I am that servicing voyeurs is the best way to make money” - using this policy statement, Zuckerberg managed to assemble around himself a team of the same hard-nosed nerds who were passionate about the ideas of dating services and building social networks.
About ten months before Zuckerberg's Facemash saga, one of the Harvard students, Hindu Narendra, had already come up with the idea of a social network exclusively for Harvard students, many of whom suffered from emotional constriction. Well, in order to prevent strangers from getting into the network, Narendra suggested using a password with a Harvard email address.
Divya Narendra's partners are twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The twins' father, Howard Winklevoss, was a successful financial consultant and invested a lot of money in his blond athlete sons - this way the problem with initial capital for the future network could be solved.
In a conversation with Mark, Narendra said that the project will be called Harvard Connection, and its participants will post their photos, personal information and useful links on the Internet. Zuckerberg's tasks included programming the site and creating special code that would allow the system to work as quickly as possible.
After a personal meeting with Narendra and the twins, Zuckerberg agreed to get involved in the work, but he was already quite skeptical about the potential of the new partners. “They didn’t have any ideas about how to advertise the future site and how to make money on it,” Mark later admitted. “Soon I began to show the guys in every possible way that we were not on the same path: as if I accidentally forgot my mobile phone charger, wasted time and dodged personal meetings in every possible way.”
It all ended with Narendra and the Winklevoss brothers still managing to pull Zuckerberg out of his lair, after which Mark announced that the ideologists of the Harvard Connection could look for a new programmer. At the same time, the future creator of Facebook did not say a word about what he had been doing for the past two months. And, of course, Zuckerberg concealed that three days before the meeting with his “colleagues” he registered the online domain TheFacebook.com, now known to the whole world as Facebook.
A social network called TheFacebook (later “The” was removed) was launched on February 4, 2004. After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were already 4,000 registered users, they concluded that the duo would need the services of new programmers. One of them was Mark’s roommate, short-haired athlete Darren Moskowitz, who opened the Facebook service for students at Columbia University, Stanford and Yale.
Around the same time, the division of the company’s property took place: 60% belonged to Zuckerberg, 35% was controlled by Saverin, and 5% went to newcomer Moskowitz. Another roommate of the friends in the dorm, Chris Hughes, became a Facebook press officer. Zuckerberg described his position as “founder, master and enemy of the state.”
Tracking Facebook's progress, the Harvard Connection trio posted angry rebukes of Zuckerberg on their website. Their own Internet project, ConnectU, was not a success, and the angry guys were left scratching their heads over how Mark managed to create Facebook code in a matter of weeks.
In order to protect himself from the three angry “right holders of the idea,” Zuckerberg plucked up the impudence and wrote a letter to Harvard management, where he portrayed himself as an innocent lamb who suffered from pushy blackmailers. The message had considerable resonance, and even two honest girls from the Harvard Black Women's Association came out in support of the injured computer genius Zuckerberg.
“I’m constantly accused of things I didn’t do,” Zuckerberg wrote on his personal website. “The Harvard Connection trio is trying to do just that and prove that I stole their non-existent ideas.” But the fact is that ideas for creating a social network for Harvard were in the air! I just inhaled them in the right way."
At first, Facebook operated only within Harvard. Some time later, registration was open to all students and schoolchildren. The main condition was the presence of a postal address in the.edu zone, which indicated that the person belonged to the educational sector.
I must say that at first this tactic worked great. The project attracted attention, but at the same time its audience was of a fairly high quality. When registering, you had to fill out a detailed profile, and in addition to your email address in educationalzone.edu, the creators also required you to add your real photo. All profiles in which people used avatars were deleted.
On May 28, 2004, Zuckerberg already boasted two hundred thousand users from thirty colleges across the country. “Harvard students were communicating with each other long before Mark entered this educational institution,” Jeff Jarvis, head of the interactive journalism program at New York University, sums up Zuckerberg’s activities. “Mark simply helped this communication: thanks to his brainchild, it became easier to organize parties and pick up girls.” According to Jarvis, Facebook is the most elegant service in terms of design among all existing ones; In addition, it allows you to find friends with similar interests with incredible ease and accuracy.
It would be a sin not to use such advantages in the interests of advertising, and Zuckerberg set out to turn the student site into a global world network. After packing his bags, Mark headed to California. Remembering the route of his spiritual father Bill Gates, Zuckerberg landed in Palo Alto, the Mecca of modern Internet technology, in the summer of 2004.
Together with his main partner Saverin, who remained in his native New York, Mark invested more than $20,000 in the development of Facebook. Thanks to these investments, Zuckerberg's troops (the future tycoon himself, Darren Moskowitz and two very young guys in the wings) occupied an entire house on Jennifer Way, in one of the quiet cul-de-sacs of Palo Alto.
When Zuckerberg was asked about this period of his life, he replied: “I usually woke up in the bedroom, looked into the kitchen and went to code. I had a girlfriend at the time, but when she suddenly disappeared, I wasn't particularly upset. After all, I always had Facebook to throw a good party.”
Zuckerberg and his friends practically did not leave their refuge, programming new services, drinking beer and listening to Green Day and Infected Mushrooms. According to the testimony of his friends at the time, Mark was not far from his image as a Harvard botanist. “It was like college,” recalls Stephen Hegarty, who joined Zuckerberg’s team that summer. “When Mark wasn’t programming, he was watching period films like Gladiator or hanging out in the kitchen, constantly quoting the comedy Wedding Crashers with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.”
At the same time, one of the future Facebook programmers, Sean Parker, one of the creators of the file-sharing program Napster, began to visit Zuckerberg’s house. Sean is a handsome young man who was considered by many to be a role model for the repressed Zuckerberg. Sean was the first to make contact, telling Mark that he was a heavy user of Facebook and would like to meet him in person. After lunch together at a Chinese restaurant, Sean moved to Jennifer Way and programming for the social network continued with renewed vigor.
It was Parker who introduced Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, co-founder of the PayPal payment system. An experienced businessman, after a fifteen-minute conversation, invested the red-haired youth for 500 thousand dollars. Zuckerberg wrote to the university for an indefinite leave of absence, just as another famous Harvard dropout, Bill Gates, once did.
“Even when our stakes got really high,” Parker recalled, “Zuckerberg continued to negotiate in his pajamas and flip-flops. Now I understand that Mark acted absolutely deliberately in fooling around in this way. It never occurred to me that he had an ironclad business acumen. Well, then it happened that Mark Zuckerberg decided to screw us all at once.”
The first to fall was the head of Mark's closest partner, Eduardo Saverin, who was accused of trying to freeze Facebook's bank account. All he could do was give a series of revealing interviews, to which Zuckerberg, of course, did not react in any way.
Already in November 2004, the number of Facebook users exceeded a million, and Mark himself voiced the network’s simple philosophy: “We will do everything to ensure that our site does not allow you to leave your monitor.” So, in general, this is what happened: numerous primitive toys like “vampires” or modern Tamagotchis from the Haikoo Zoo tied people to Facebook seriously and for a long time. Music lovers, whose favorite bands were represented on Zuckerberg’s social network, became even more hooked on the service.
Already in the spring of 2005, about thirteen million dollars had been invested in the Facebook project, although Zuckerberg himself continued to play the role of a wayward, eccentric nerd. In particular, he had two types of business cards: one was engraved with only the owner’s first and last name, and the inscription on the other read: “I’m the CEO, bitch.” With the same infantile impudence, Mark avoided interviews that could shed light on his relationships with former accomplices and present him as a living person.
The faster Facebook's capital grew, the fewer friends Zuckerberg remained with. Harvard friend Chris Hughes now works for Barack Obama, lead programmer Adam D'Angelo left the company in May of this year, Eduardo Saverin began a lawsuit against Mark, and Dustin Moskowitz went on indefinite leave.
Lawsuits against Facebook
The first of the legal cases related to the social network and its creator began just six days after the launch of TheFacebook. Three Harvard seniors - brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their partner Divya Narendra - said in the Harvard Crimson newspaper that Mark stole their ideas. Allegedly, they hired a programmer to work on their website HarvardConnection.com and provided him with the source code for their ConnectU project, and he misled them for about a month, using their ideas to write his own code. The trial itself was initiated later, but in the end the dispute was settled - Zuckerberg paid the plaintiffs $65 million so that they would calm down and no longer file lawsuits.
The second lawsuit was more serious because it was related to one of the founders of Facebook. Eduardo Saverin, in fact, is the first sponsor of the project and its business manager, as well as a close friend of Zuckerberg. Saverin filed a lawsuit and in January 2009 the court confirmed his right to 5% of the campaign shares (more than $1 billion).
However, twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for the social network Facebook, filed another lawsuit.
The Winklevoss twins said the $65 million they were paid in 2008 to end their legal battle in the case was not enough because their former friend lied about the real value of Facebook.com. The brothers claim that Zuckerberg is involved in securities fraud and are demanding more substantial compensation.
Facebook vehemently denies the Winklevoss's claim, and its legal filing claims that the twins themselves miscalculated the company's value, and their claims of fraud are based on an important omission - "they mistakenly believe that their nemesis will voluntarily provide them with his financial statements and information About company". Zuckerberg's lawyers insist that the Winklevoss brothers never demanded that their client provide them with official documents about the site's income.
The feud between the twins and Zuckerberg takes on an even sharper hue against the backdrop of the wealth that has been showering golden rain on the founder of the global social network over the past few years. Forbes estimates Zuckerberg is one of the 35 richest Americans with a personal net worth of $6.9 billion, thus ahead of Apple founder Steve Jobs.
The “the” from the site’s name disappeared in 2005 after the company acquired the Facebook.com domain for a whopping $200,000. In the fall of 2005, the number of Facebook users already numbered more than 5 million active customers. In September of the same year, the opportunity to register became available to US high school students, although at that time they needed to receive an invitation from one of the already registered participants. Then the circle expanded to employees of some companies, for example, Apple and Microsoft.
September 26, 2006 was one of the most important milestones in the history of the project: the site opened registration for everyone who has a working e-mail address. The only age limit left is 13 years. The percentage of customers over 30 has grown significantly, and Facebook has established itself among the leaders of the Internet, consistently remaining the seventh most popular site in America.
In 2007, the most important event for Facebook happened. Microsoft acquired a 1.6% stake in Facebook for an impressive sum of $240 million, as well as the rights to place its advertising on this resource until 2011. Based on this, many analysts have suggested that Facebook's total value is $15 billion. Not a weak result for a company whose revenues did not exceed 200 million a year. After the deal, a rather interesting event occurred. Bill Gates himself signed up for Facebook. At one time, he devoted several hours a day to communicating via Facebook with everyone who wanted to, but then decided to delete his account, since there were too many of those who wanted to. He simply did not physically have time to communicate with them. However, Gates provided serious PR for Facebook around the world. This is especially important for Microsoft given that it has an exclusive agreement with the Zuckerberg network under which it is Facebook's primary advertising partner.
If we talk about the atmosphere in the company itself, then until now it corresponded to the image of a technical startup. No dress code, flexible working hours, a founder who wears sandals - many of these things are still relevant on Facebook. However, since Sharyl Sanberg from Google came to the company, the situation has changed somewhat. Discipline in the company has become much stricter. Facebook is starting to transform itself from a startup into a corporation.
Facebook's latest breakthrough was the development of its API, which allowed thousands of developers around the world to write programs for the social network. Quite quickly the project began to acquire small applications of varying degrees of usefulness. Various informers, calendars, organizers. But the main thing was the small games that simply flooded Facebook.
The interesting thing is that many developers have already made serious money thanks to this platform. And Facebook, unlike Apple (the situation with the iPhone), does not take any money from them.
As for earning models, the company is trying to try different options.
Selling advertising is not everything. So, for some time now, on Facebook, each network member can order another completely real product that can be obtained in a regular store. This is a simple gift that you can give without leaving the cash register. What is needed for this? Pay for the goods, select a recipient. He will receive a special ID, which he will have to present in one of the stores that cooperate with Facebook.
Another interesting way Facebook makes money is through paid groups for businesses. In general, many companies were creating their own groups on Facebook from the very beginning, but then the administration of the resource introduced a number of serious restrictions that complicated the interaction of the group’s audience with its creators. In particular, one of these restrictions was the limit on 1200 messages per day that the group administrator can send. What if it consists of millions? Then the company will have to purchase a subscription to a paid group. The possibilities here are extremely wide, there are no numerous restrictions of ordinary groups, and in general everything is done so that companies can communicate productively with clients. There is even an opportunity to style the page to match your corporate style.
The influential American magazine Time gave the cover of its January issue to 26-year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, calling him “Person of 2010.”
Last year, Lady Gaga, James Cameron, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others competed for the title of “Person of the Year 2010”. However, Time magazine chose its hero – the founder of the social network Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. “The social network created by Mark has connected almost every tenth inhabitant of the planet,” Time editor-in-chief Richard Stangel explained his choice. In his opinion, “today Facebook is the third largest country in the world, which knows as much about its citizens as no government on Earth knows.”
According to Time, no one person has had a greater impact on the world over the past year than the current laureate. His popularity is so high that this year even the film “The Social Network” was released, in which Jesse Eisenberg brilliantly played the main role of the creator of Facebook. Previously, US Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama became “people of the year” according to Time magazine.
Galina Galkina: Did you meet Mark before you played him?
Jesse Eisenberg: No - I didn't know him before filming the movie and I still haven't met him. But my cousin works at Zuckerberg’s company, and he told me about him.
Galina Galkina: And what did he tell you?
Jesse Eisenberg: Don't expect sensations. Mark is modesty itself. He is completely unpretentious in everyday life. He is the epitome of what we call a geek. He lives by the interests of Facebook.
Galina Galkina: Did your brother tell you how Mark reacted to the film?
Jesse Eisenberg: Mark, I think, called it "fiction."
Galina Galkina: What do you think about this?
Jesse Eisenberg: Ben Mezrich did a ton of research when he wrote his novel The Social Network, which became the basis for the film. However, Mark Zuckerberg did not give him an interview. So it's not surprising that he has a similar reaction to the film.
“Each of us thinks of ourselves as the hero of our own story.”
Galina Galkina: What definition would you give to your character now?
Jesse Eisenberg: I think that Mark Zuckerberg - at least my character, not the real person - is an innovator, but his goal is not personal gain. What I know about the real Mark Zuckerberg is that he is a very humble person. Even after the number of visitors to his website has exceeded 500 million, he continues to live a very modest lifestyle. He is not interested in luxury goods, nor is he interested in money. He is, above all, passionate about his site. Mark considers Facebook to be much more important than he is. The drama of this story is that he treats the site as a goal of paramount importance, so his relationship with his associates breaks down.
Being a deutanopic, Zuckerberg distinguishes between red and green much worse than blue, Facebook's main color.
In the second episode of the 22nd season of the animated series The Simpsons, Zuckerberg voiced himself.
In January 2011, an unknown hacker hacked Mark's Facebook page.
There is a 4th registered user in the Facebook database (the first three are test ones).
Mark Zuckerberg is a fan of the American band Green Day.
According to men's magazine GQ, Mark is considered the most tastelessly dressed resident of Silicon Valley.
Back in college, Mark was noticed by Microsoft employees after he wrote the Synapse program, which allowed the computer to independently compose a sequence of musical hits for its owner.
Sources
Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia, WikiPedia
forbes.ru – Forbes
novostimira.com.ua – News of the World
allreport.ru – A little bit about everything
peoples.ru – People
spaceincome.com – Spaceincome
constructorus.ru – Success Constructor
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Mark Zuckerberg.
The versatility of human nature knows no bounds. Who would have thought that the youngest billionaire in the world and the most tastelessly dressed male celebrity, an inventive programmer and a prominent polyglot, the most influential Jew on the planet and a budding swordsman - all these are characteristics of the same person.
His name - Mark Zuckerberg.
I will dwell in a little more detail on the legal conflicts that befell Mark Zuckerberg after the launch of Facebook.
The offended guys from Harvard Connection were the first to take on Mark. Just 6 days after the historic launch of Facebook.com, they filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg. According to them, the talented programmer not only did not fulfill his promise (see above), but also used their ideas to create his world-famous brainchild. In fact, it was about the theft of intellectual property. Litigation in this case lasted from February 2004 to June 2008, when the injured party received 1.2 million common shares of Facebook and $20 million in cash as compensation. In total this is about 65 million dollars.
The second person who laid claim to part of the social network Facebook was its first sponsor, Eduardo Saverin. It is not entirely clear what exactly the once friends Mark and Eduardo did not share, but the result of their disagreement in 2009 was 5% of the company’s shares for Eduardo. At that time it was about 1 billion dollars.
In 2010, a certain Paul Seglia appeared on the life horizon of Mark Zuckerberg. The latter, insisting on his investment in the programmer back in 2003, laid claim to 84% of Facebook.
However, Paul never managed to benefit from the generosity of the creator of Facebook. In 2012, he was arrested on suspicion of fraud and fabrication of evidence against Mark Zuckerberg.
The most, the most, the most...
Lawsuits are the downside of wealth and popularity. And they grew and continue to grow by leaps and bounds for Mark Zuckerberg. Along with them, all sorts of “titles and regalia” rained down on him. Only the most interesting of them are listed below.
- 2010- Forbes magazine recognizes Mark as the youngest billionaire in the world (in March his fortune was estimated at $4 billion). In addition, another world-famous publication, Time, calls Mark “person of the year.” This year can also be considered a landmark year for Mark Zuckerberg due to the fact that David Fincher’s film “The Social Network” is being released on big screens. Who do you think served as the prototype for the main character?! Thus, Mark was filmed during his lifetime. But he was only 26 then...
- 2011- Mark Zuckerberg is hailed as the most influential Jew on the planet. By the way, he retains this “title” to this day. In the same year, Mark received very dubious recognition from the world community - GQ magazine named him the most tastelessly dressed billionaire.
- year 2013- the same Forbes estimates Mark’s fortune at $19 billion, which means that the creator of Facebook has increased his income almost 5 times in 3 years. This is an absolute record for young self-made billionaires.
Another Mark Zuckerberg
With the title “the very best,” Mark was forced to begin to behave more publicly. Just like the rich and famous do. At least that part of them that is conscientious.
In September 2010, Mark Zuckerberg allocated $100 million from his own funds to save the Newark public school system (New Jersey, USA). Evil tongues say that this was done for the sole purpose of whitening his name after the release of the aforementioned film “The Social Network,” in which the image of the young billionaire turned out to be very controversial.
I would not share this point of view, if only because already in December 2010, Mark Zuckerberg joined the so-called “Giving Pledge” - a philanthropic initiative of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and George Lucas. Let me remind you that at one time these billionaires were the first to declare that after their death at least half of their fortune would be used for charitable purposes.
Having taken on such noble obligations, Mark did not stop doing charity work. In December 2012, he donated $500 million to further develop young companies in Silicon Valley.
Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic thoughts were also manifested in the development of Internet projects other than Facebook. Let's say he became the leader of the FWD.us movement, whose goal is to optimize immigration legislation and the US education system.
Moreover, in August 2013, Mark Zuckerberg launched a new project on the Internet - Internet.org. Its task is truly epoch-making - to enable 5 billion people who still do not have the Internet to use it. How this will happen and whether it will be implemented in practice at all, time will tell. But the idea itself is worthy of the highest praise!
Rich "nerds" are people too...
And nothing human is alien to them. It turns out that Mark Zuckerberg has a personal life and it is connected with Priscilla Chen. He met her in his second year at Harvard.
The couple’s relationship has stood the test of time, for it was only in 2010 that Mark invited his future wife to move in with him in Palo Alto. The girl agreed and on May 19, 2012 they got married.
It is especially worth remembering the originality of the wedding ceremony. About 100 people gathered in Mark's backyard. They all thought they were visiting Zuckerberg on the occasion of his wife's graduation as a doctor (Priscilla is a pediatrician). However, it turned out that they were invited to a wedding. Another joke from Mark, you know...
Bonus!