Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

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 site Facebook. Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of Facebook, Inc. Zuckerberg's personal wealth is estimated to be $9.4 billion as of 2012.

Born and raised in New York state, Zuckerberg took up writing software programs as a hobby in middle school, beginning with BASIC, with help from his father and a tutor (who called him a "prodigy"). In high school, he excelled in classic literature and fencing while studying at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Zuckerberg later attended Harvard College, majoring in computer science and psychology. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program called Facemash as a "fun" project, letting students on the college's network vote on the attractiveness of other students' photos. It was shut down within days, but would become a template for his writing Facebook, a program he launched from his dormitory room. With the help of friends, he took Facebook to other campuses nationwide and soon after moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2007, Zuckerberg was a billionaire at the age of 23. By 2010, Facebook had an estimated 500 million users worldwide. Zuckerberg has since been involved in various legal disputes initiated by others who have claimed a share of the company's profits due to their help in setting it up.

Since 2010, Zuckerberg has been named among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world by Time magazine's Person of the Year. In 2010, a fictionalized account of Zuckerberg creating Facebook while in college and its later start-up phase was made into a dramatized film, The Social Network.