Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after being born in White Plains. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, was a dentist, and his mother, Karen Kempner, was a psychiatrist. He grew up with his sisters Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg began programming during childhood. At about age 11 or 12, he created ZuckNet, a messaging system that connected computers in his home with his father's dental office. He also designed computer games and later developed Synapse, a music program that used machine learning to recognize listening habits. Microsoft and AOL expressed interest in the software, but he chose to attend Harvard University instead.

He attended Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he became captain of the fencing team and earned a diploma in classics. At Harvard, he studied computer science and psychology and developed CourseMatch, which helped students choose classes and form study groups. He also created Facemash, a photo-ranking site that Harvard shut down after complaints about the use of students' images.

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com with Harvard roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The service began as a directory where students could create profiles, upload photographs and connect with other users. Its emphasis on real names and networks of friends and friends of friends became central to its social graph model.

Facebook expanded from Harvard to other universities, high schools and international institutions. Zuckerberg left Harvard during his second year and moved the company's operations to Palo Alto, California, where Peter Thiel provided early investment. Sean Parker joined the early team and helped arrange Thiel's investment. Zuckerberg also turned down acquisition approaches, including a major offer from Yahoo, while focusing on expanding the platform.

The creation and ownership of Facebook led to legal disputes involving Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who said Zuckerberg had agreed to help build their HarvardConnection project before developing a competing service. The dispute ended in a settlement. Eduardo Saverin also brought a lawsuit that was settled, while the company affirmed his status as a Facebook co-founder.

Facebook held its initial public offering in 2012, one of the largest technology IPOs in United States history. The company's growth established Zuckerberg as one of the most influential technology executives and led to his selection as Time's Person of the Year in 2010.

Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, adding major photo-sharing and messaging services to Zuckerberg's expanding technology group. In 2019, he announced plans to integrate the technical infrastructure of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, enabling greater communication across the services.

In October 2021, Facebook's parent company changed its name to Meta Platforms. The rebranding reflected Zuckerberg's emphasis on the metaverse, a vision of social interaction through virtual and augmented reality. Meta invested heavily in virtual reality products including Meta Quest and Horizon Worlds, although Horizon Worlds faced criticism over technical problems and limited user engagement.

Meta later placed increasing emphasis on artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg announced major AI investment plans, supported open-source AI models and promoted the idea of widely accessible personal superintelligence. The company's AI work became a central part of its strategy alongside its continuing development of virtual and augmented reality.

Zuckerberg has faced sustained scrutiny over Facebook's effects on privacy, political communication and public discourse. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, involving the harvesting of data from Facebook profiles, led him to testify before the United States Congress in 2018. He acknowledged that Facebook had failed to take a broad enough view of its responsibilities and said the episode represented a breach of trust.

He later testified about misinformation, hate speech, antitrust issues and child safety on social media. During a 2024 Senate hearing on online child safety, Zuckerberg apologized to families whose children had been harmed through social media. Meta has also faced continuing legal and political challenges concerning the effects of Instagram and Facebook on young people.

Zuckerberg supported immigration reform and other progressive causes during the 2000s and 2010s. He founded the advocacy group FWD.us, whose goals included immigration reform, education improvement and technological innovation. He later criticized government pressure to restrict some COVID-19 content and shifted Meta's United States content-moderation policy toward a community-driven system after ending its independent fact-checking program.

Zuckerberg has directed substantial philanthropic activity toward education, health, scientific research and journalism. He signed the Giving Pledge with Priscilla Chan and announced that they intended to give the majority of their wealth toward advancing human potential and promoting equality.

Zuckerberg and Chan established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which supports health and education programs. The initiative also helped create Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a collaborative research center involving scientists and engineers from the University of California, San Francisco, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

His philanthropic work has included support for Newark Public Schools, Ebola response efforts, a San Francisco public hospital and local journalism. The structure and influence of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have prompted debate about the role of privately controlled organizations in public-interest work.

Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, a fellow Harvard student, in 2003. They married in Palo Alto in May 2012, shortly after Chan completed medical school. They have three daughters, Maxima, known as Max, born in 2015, August, born in 2017, and Aurelia, born in 2023.

Zuckerberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household and later identified as an atheist before saying that religion had become important to him. He studied Mandarin Chinese and delivered a speech in Mandarin at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2014.

He began training in mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu in 2022. In 2023, he competed in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament and won gold and silver medals in gi and no-gi events at white belt. He was later promoted to blue belt by coach Dave Camarillo.

Zuckerberg's early career and the founding of Facebook were dramatized in the 2010 film The Social Network, with Jesse Eisenberg portraying him. The film was based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires and focused on Facebook's origins, relationships among its founders and the legal disputes surrounding the company's creation.

Zuckerberg criticized the film's portrayal and argued that many of its details and motivations were inaccurate. David Kirkpatrick and former Facebook engineer Karel Baloun likewise described the movie's overall impression of Zuckerberg as substantially fictionalized.

He later met Eisenberg during a 2011 episode of Saturday Night Live. Zuckerberg also appeared as himself in The Simpsons and in the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply.