Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard.

He is currently one of the youngest billionaires in the world with personal wealth of US$4 billion in 2010.

Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York to a Jewish family and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter Academy, Mark went to school at Ardsley High School. “At high school, he excelled in the classics. He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy where he immersed himself in Latin.  He also built a program to help the workers in his father’s office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk and a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead. In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.

Facebook was not Zuckerberg’s first attempt to aggregate student information. Zuckerberg had earlier hacked into the university’s computers. Instead of changing his grades, he downloaded pictures of undergraduates for his own “Hot or Not” style web site called Facemash, which invited browsers to rate the photos on their relative attractiveness. Instant notoriety followed, and Harvard pulled the plug on the site within hours. After being censured for purloining images from the student records, Zuckerberg set up a site that allowed the students themselves to upload their photos and personal information.

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the “Facebook”. Once at college, Zuckerberg’s Facebook started off as just a “Harvard-thing”, until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to other schools with social contacts with Harvard.

Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in California. To date, he has not returned as a student to college.

You can watch a photo gallery from Washington Post while reading some interesting facts about Mark Zuckerberg

You can watch Mark being interviewed about Facebook.