Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of the largest social network Facebook, businessman and philanthropist. Mark Zuckerberg's fortune is estimated at several tens of billions of dollars.
Mark Zuckerberg's childhood
The story of Mark Zuckerberg begins in a small town on the banks of the Hudson called Dobbs Ferry, whose population does not exceed ten thousand people. Mark grew up in a typical American home in a respectable suburb an hour's drive from New York. There he lived with his parents and three sisters. He has always had good relations with his family and relatives. They called him nothing less than a prince.
As a child, Mark Zuckerberg was engaged in fencing. However, he soon became interested in computers and programming. At the age of 12, he read a book on programming for beginners and later wrote the computer version of the game "Risk" himself. Mark has become a real computer geek. He was fascinated by everything that most adolescents found insanely boring. He took part in quizzes, was fond of history and politics, and was significantly ahead of his peers in intellectual development.
History of success. The first steps
Mark's father decided to find him a personal teacher, with whom he studied once a week. After that, he was able to enter Mercy College, where he was much younger than his fellow students. Due to the fact that he was too different from the rest of the students, he had to become the subject of ridicule and bullying more than once. He even had to change his educational institution several times in order to get rid of the environment he hated. In one of the best high schools in the United States, Phillips Exeter, which is located in Boston, Mark went without hesitation. It was there, as a graduate student, that Zuckerberg came up with the ingenious idea of writing a program that he would call "Synapse." The program analyzed the music that the user was listening to and offered him new compositions. For 17-year-old Mark and his friend Adam de Angelo, it was just fun. Nevertheless, several thousand users downloaded Synapse in a few days. Major software developers, including Microsoft, wanted to buy Mark's software. However, he did not pursue the goal of profit and did not sell his programs.
Harvard
After becoming a Harvard student, Mark settled in the Kirkland dormitory. He was not very popular among students and always kept himself rather apart, preferring to communicate only with a small circle of friends who were also fond of computers. At Harvard, he is remembered as a student who always wore rubber slippers and did not care about his own appearance. He was also not very popular with girls, but by the end of his second year he had a regular girlfriend with whom he dated.
Mark tried to find his place in the student community. Once he met a man who will play an important role in his destiny. It was Eduardo Severino, a very wealthy Brazilian and successful businessman. By his age, he was able to earn several hundred thousand dollars playing in the stock market. They had many common interests, which soon made them inseparable. Another close friend of Mark was Joe Greene, whom they met at a student club meeting. According to Joe, he and Mark were united by a love of pranks and tricks.
It was the love of antics that made Mark do what he did in November 2003. He sat in his dorm room and, having nothing to do, leafed through a catalog with photographs of university students, which was in closed access. Zuckerberg decided to have some fun and hold a kind of beauty contest. He quickly created a site called FaceMash. Mark hacked into the university's server to obtain photographs of all Harvard students. The entire hacking process took him only eight hours. Facemash was launched on November 2, 2003. The news spread across the campus at the speed of light. The virtual voting site became so popular that the entire computer network of the university was turned off due to excessive load. The ethical side of such a site raised many questions from the university administration. Mark was summoned to a disciplinary meeting, where he was called hackers, a bully and threatened to be expelled from the university, but he managed to get off with only a warning. Since then, Mark's status among students has changed forever. At last they began to notice him.
Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, senior students at Harvard, also came up with their site - a semblance of future social networks. They asked Mark to help them create such a website. This idea absorbed him so much that he began working on his own website, which he decided to call Facebook.
For financial help, he turned to his friend Eduardo Severino, promising thirty percent of the value of the shares of the future company and the position of commercial director. On February 4, 2004, the site was launched. The start-up capital of the company was only one thousand dollars.
In just three weeks, Facebook's audience was 6,000 Harvard students. A few months later, students from nine other universities registered on the site.
Mark, the founder of Facebook, dreamed of bringing the site to the top places of attendance. He opened his first office in San Francisco. At first, the company consisted of only three people. Zuckerberg's richest friend and part-time sponsor of the company, Eduardo Severino, was in no hurry to drop out and move to another city to work on the site. Mark could not forgive him for this.
The atmosphere in the office was quite relaxed and the company's revenues remained fairly modest. Eduardo never came to San Francisco, and the company needed more and more investments. Mark decides to replace Eduardo with Sean Parker, who already had a wealth of experience in website promotion. It was he who helped attract new investors to the company. Soon, the site's value was already estimated at one hundred million dollars.
In 2010, a film about Mark Zuckerberg was released based on the book by Ben Mezrich, written in 2009. The film shows the history of the creation of Facebook and the conflicts that arose between him and the people involved in this process.
In the same year, while participating in the famous talk show Oprah Winfrey, Mark announced his intention to donate $ 100 million to education in the United States.
In December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was going to donate 99% of Facebook to charity.
Personal life of Mark Zuckerberg
When Mark Zuckerberg was 28 years old, he married Priscilla Chang, whom they had met for 9 years. The media learned about the new status of the billionaire from the social network, where he changed the column "marital status" to "married".
Priscilla Chan graduated from Harvard with a degree in pediatrician, translator and physician. She gives a lot of time to charity aimed at the development of medicine and pedagogy.
Mark and Priscilla are raising two daughters, Maxim and August.
For 2017-2018, Mark Zuckerberg's fortune is estimated at more than $ 70 billion.
