Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in a Harvard dormitory and built it into a company that reaches roughly half the people alive. Born in 1984 in New York state to a dentist and a psychiatrist, he was programming as a child, wrote a messaging system for his father's practice at about twelve, and turned down Microsoft for Harvard. Facemash, in 2003, put pairs of students' photographs side by side and asked which was more attractive; the university shut it down and disciplined him for breaching security and privacy. TheFacebook launched in February 2004, spread college by college, and moved to Palo Alto that summer. He dropped out, took investment from Peter Thiel, and settled a long suit brought by the Winklevoss twins, who said the idea was theirs, for stock worth a great deal more than the cash. The company bought Instagram in 2012 for a billion dollars and WhatsApp in 2014 for nineteen, both of which looked expensive and were not, and both of which are now central to antitrust arguments against it. Its revenue is advertising sold against behavioural data, and the consequences have been the story of the last decade: Cambridge Analytica, the role of the platform in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, which the company itself acknowledged, election interference, and the internal research on teenage mental health disclosed in 2021. He renamed the company Meta that year and spent tens of billions on virtual reality, then redirected it to artificial intelligence. He holds voting control outright and cannot be removed. He has pledged to give away most of his fortune through a limited liability company rather than a foundation, which drew criticism for the difference.
- Lived: 1984 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, programmer
