Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, billionaire and philanthropist. He is famous for co-founding Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms.
Mark was born in New York in the family of psychiatrist and dentist. He and his sisters were raised in Reform Judaism household because of the grandparents.
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with each other.During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The New Yorker profile said of Zuckerberg: “some kids played computer games. Mark created them.”
In 2002 he began to study at Harvard. He studied psychology and computer science. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program that 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 the college shut it down, because its popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard’s network switches.
In 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook" in partnership with his roommates. Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors 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. Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate. Later he dropped out of Harvard and moved to California to complete the project. They had turned down offers by major corporations to buy the company. 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."The same year, speaking at Stanford University, Zuckerberg proposed that "young people are just smarter" and that other entrepreneurs should bias towards hiring young people.
On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500-million-user mark. 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.
In 2012, Facebook had roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic clone VK had around 34 million. Zuckerberg receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. In June 2016, Zuckerberg was named as one of the "Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" along with Elon Musk and Sal Khan, due to the fact that he and his wife "pledged to give away 99% of their wealth—which is estimated at $55.0 billion." In January 2019, Zuckerberg laid plans to integrate an end-to-end encrypted system for three major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. On August 14, 2020, Facebook integrated the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger on both iOS and Android devices. The update encouraged cross-communication between Instagram and Facebook users. It’s now called Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg believes that Metaverse will take a world into a more robust economy, where people can do things that are intellectually or physically interesting to them. Communities will pop up, leading to monetization and self-sustaining ecosystems.
Zuckerberg is also a board member of the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough Starshot, which he co-founded in 2016. Moreover, Mark and his wife are spending $3 billion in an attempt to end, cure or manage all disease by the year 2100. Now Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is 37 with 2 kids and Net Worth of $67.5B(19 in the world). He undoubtedly built his own empire with nothing at the start and intends to develop even more not for his own sake, but for the world. All of this shows that he could be called a true visionary.