short essay about mark zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest billionaires.

Who Is Mark Zuckerberg?

Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. He was raised in the nearby village of Dobbs Ferry.

Zuckerberg’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children — Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house.

Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it."

Mark Zuckerberg’s Education

To keep up with Zuckerberg's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Zuckerberg. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy , an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.

Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse.

Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.

Mark Zuckerberg's College Experience

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University . After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to his new company, Facebook, full time.

By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users.

He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.

Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite.

Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg and Founding Facebook

Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin created The Facebook, a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site out of a dorm room at Harvard University until June 2004.

That year Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students.

Zuckerberg's company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub.

Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks . Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.

‘Harvard Connection’ and Legal Hurdles

Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up. However, in 2006, the business mogul faced his first big hurdle: the creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses.

Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks. After lawyers searched Zuckerberg's records, incriminating instant messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users' private information to his friends.

Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. "If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?" he said in an interview with The New Yorker . "I think I've grown and learned a lot."

Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their stock.

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'The Social Network' Movie

In 2010, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Social Network was released. The critically acclaimed film received eight Academy Award nominations.

Sorkin’s screenplay was based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires , by writer Ben Mezrich. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters.

Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter at The New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg had been dating his longtime girlfriend since 2003. He also said he was never interested in joining any of the final clubs.

"It's interesting what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own," Zuckerberg told a reporter at a startup conference in 2010. "So there's all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right."

Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2010, and Vanity Fair placed him at the top of their New Establishment list.

Facebook IPO

In May 2012, Facebook had its initial public offering, which raised $16 billion, making it the biggest Internet IPO in history.

After the initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the early days of trading, though Zuckerberg is expected to weather any ups and downs in his company's market performance.

In 2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list.

Fake News and Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Zuckerberg was criticized for the proliferation of fake news posts on his site leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2018, he announced a personal challenge to develop improved methods for defending Facebook users from abuse and interference by nation-states. (Previous personal challenges began in New Year's 2009 and have included only eating meat he killed himself and learning to speak Mandarin.)

"We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools," he wrote on his Facebook page. "If we're successful this year then we'll end 2018 on a much better trajectory."

Zuckerberg came under fire again a few months later when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump ’s 2016 campaign, had used private information from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting its owners. The resulting outcry seemed to shake investors' confidence in Facebook, its shares dropping by 15 percent after the news became public.

Following a few days' silence, Zuckerberg surfaced on various outlets to explain how the company was taking steps to limit third-party developers' access to user information, and said he would be happy to testify before Congress.

On Sunday, March 25, Facebook took out full-page ads in seven British and three American newspapers, penned in the form of a personal apology from Zuckerberg. He promised the company would investigate all of its apps, and remind users which ones they can shut off. "I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time," he wrote. "I promise to do better for you."

Amid increasing calls for his resignation from investor groups, Zuckerberg traveled to Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers ahead of his two-day testimony, scheduled for April 10 and 11. The first day of hearings, with the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, was considered a tame affair, with some senators seemingly struggling to understand the business model that powered the social media giant.

The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day's testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was "inevitable."

Personal Wealth

The negative PR around the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica scandal seemingly did little to slow the company's progress: Facebook saw its stock close at a record $203.23 on July 6, 2018. The surge bumped Zuckerberg past Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest person, behind fellow tech titans Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Any gains were wiped out when Facebook shares dropped a staggering 19 percent on July 26, following an earnings report that revealed a failure to meet revenue expectations and slowing user growth. Nearly $16 billion of Zuckerberg's personal fortune was erased in one day.

The stock rebounded, and Zuckerberg remains one of the world's wealthiest people. In 2019, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg at No. 8 on its ‘Billionaires’ list—behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates (No. 2) and ahead of Google co-founders Larry Page (No. 10) and Sergey Brin (No. 14). The magazine estimated his net worth to be about $62.3 billion at the time.

In June 2019, Facebook announced it was getting into the cryptocurrency business with the planned launch of Libra in 2020. Along with developing the blockchain technology to power its financial infrastructure, Facebook established a Switzerland-based oversight entity called the Libra Association, comprised of tech giants like Spotify and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz.

The news again put Zuckerberg in the crosshairs of Congress, which summoned the CEO to testify before the House Financial Service Committee in October. Despite providing assurances that Facebook would withdraw from the Libra Association if the project failed to garner approval from regulators, Zuckerberg faced pointed questioning from skeptical lawmakers who cited the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and other past transgressions.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife

Zuckerberg has been married to Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2012. The longtime couple tied the knot one day after Facebook’s IPO.

About 100 people gathered at the couple's Palo Alto, California home for the ceremony. The guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Daughters

Zuckerberg has two daughters, Max, born on November 30, 2015, and August, born on August 28, 2017.

The couple announced they were expecting both of their children on Facebook. When Zuckerberg welcomed Max, he announced he would be taking two months of paternity leave to spend with his family.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Donations and Philanthropic Causes

Since amassing his sizeable fortune, Zuckerberg has used his millions to fund a variety of philanthropic causes. The most notable examples came in September 2010, when he donated $100 million to save the failing Newark Public Schools system in New Jersey.

Then, in December 2010, Zuckerberg signed the "Giving Pledge", promising to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members include Bill Gates , Warren Buffett and George Lucas . After his donation, Zuckerberg called on other young, wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit.

"With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts," he said.

In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity.

"We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children," the couple wrote in the open letter that was posted on Zuckerberg's Facebook page. "We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation."

In September 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the company into which they put their Facebook shares, would invest at least $3 billion into scientific research over the next decade to help “cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The Rockefeller University , was named the president of science at CZI.

They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub , a San Francisco-based independent research center that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University , the University of California, San Francisco , and the University of California, Berkeley , Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1984
• Birth date: May 14, 1984
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: White Plains
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest billionaires.
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Phillips Exeter Academy
• Harvard University

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Zuckerberg Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/mark-zuckerberg
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 24, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts.
• If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I've grown and learned a lot.
• Understanding people is not a waste of time.
• Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are.
• I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do. I think people really undervalue the option value in flexibility.
• What Facebook is today isn't a set of information, it's a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information. They are only going to do that as long as they trust us.
• Everything I do breaks, but I fix it quickly.
• I would personally rather be underestimated. It gives us latitude to go out and make some big bets.
• Apps aren’t the center of the world. People are.
• Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.
• Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.
• People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
• [T]he real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
• A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible.

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Mark Zuckerberg is a self-taught computer programmer and founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta (FB), Facebook, co-founded by Andrew McCollum , Dustin Moskovitz , Chris Hughes , and Eduardo Saverin at Harvard University’s Bedroom in 2004. In the third quarter of 2020, Meta recorded 2.74 billion monthly active users. According to Entrepreneurs Media, Zuckerberg’s net worth was about $100 billion in December 2020.

Mark Zuckerberg: An Intro

Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, and showed an early interest in technology. At a local college, he studied the BASIC programming language. And at the age of 12, he created an instant-messaging software that his father used in his office.

Zuckerberg was a Harvard University student. He left out after his sophomore year to concentrate on the development of Facebook. FaceMash is a website for assessing the beauty of other Harvard students. And HarvardConnection.com, an online social networking platform, spawned the site.

In 2004, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, the three credited founders of HarvardConnection.com, sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing intellectual property from the website. They reached a multi-million dollar settlement of cash and stock options in 2008. The Winklevoss twins tried to reopen the lawsuit in 2011, but the court denied their request.

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Facebook

Facebook secured $12.7 million in venture finance in mid-2005, allowing it to expand its reach to hundreds of institutions and high schools. One year later, the social network was exposed to the whole public, and Yahoo! made an offer of $1 billion to buy the firm, which Zuckerberg turned down.

When Facebook went public in 2012, it raised $16 billion. Making it the most successful online initial public offering (IPO) in history. The photo-sharing startup Instagram was taken by Facebook the same year. And Zuckerberg married Priscilla Chan in a surprise ceremony the day after the IPO.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan

Zuckerberg has made news for his charity. A $100 million contribution to Newark, New Jersey, schools in 2010. After donating 18 million shares of Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in Mountain View, Calif., in 2014. The periodical Philanthropy named Zuckerberg and Chan the most generous American philanthropists of the previous year.

On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan wrote a letter to their daughter Max. In which they unveiled the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Which aims to “unite individuals across the world to expand human potential. And promote equality for all children in the future generation.” In the post, Zuckerberg and Chan stated that “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities” will be the “initial areas of focus,” and that “we will give 99 percent of our Facebook shares—currently about $45 billion—during our lives to advance this mission.”

Cambridge Analytica’s controversies

Meta has been criticized for gathering and selling personal data. Postings, and instant messaging of its members almost from its beginning. These allegations intensified immediately after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Some say that Russian-funded targeted advertising influenced American votes. The New York Times and The Observer revealed in March 2018 that Cambridge Analytica . A U.K.-based political consulting business had engaged an independent researcher. To get data on 50 million Facebook users without their consent. The purpose of Cambridge Analytica , according to the New York Times was to use the data for its trademark “psychographic modeling,”. With the goal of “reading voters’ thoughts” and affecting election outcomes.

In April 2018, Facebook confirmed that the data of 87 million users had been shared with Cambridge Analytica. Not the 50 million previously estimated.

Early this month, Zuckerberg appeared on Capitol Hill. To speak on Facebook’s handling of customer data before House and Senate committees. Zuckerberg said in prepared statements before the Senate. That Facebook had helped people connect amid the #MeToo movement and many calamities. The statement went on to clarify. That, everyone else, Zuckerberg, and Facebook learned. About Cambridge Analytica’s participation via the media. Besides “safeguarding our platform,”. “investigating other applications,” and “creating tighter controls,”. Zuckerberg highlighted activities. That Facebook planned to do to avoid future events of this sort.

Purchasies by Facebook

Over the years, Meta has bought hundreds of firms. Including Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. WhatsApp for $22 billion in cash and stock in 2014. Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014 and a variety of other startups ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to identification systems.

• Andrew McCollum
• Cambridge Analytica
• Chris Hughes
• Dustin Moakovitz
• Enduardo Saverin
• Harvard University
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Priscilla Chan
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Life Story of Famous People

Short Bio » Entrepreneur » Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg is the chairman, chief executive, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world’s youngest billionaires. His net worth is estimated to be $51.8 billion as of 2016.

Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website Facebook out of his college dorm room with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin , Andrew McCollum , Dustin Moskovitz , and Chris Hughes . He left Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site, the user base of which has grown to more than 250 million people, making Zuckerberg a billionaire.

His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family’s home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple’s four children—Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan , at a fraternity party during his sophomore year at Harvard. They began dating in 2003. After a long gap, Zuckerberg and Chan married on May 19, 2012.

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The Journey of Mark Zuckerberg: From Harvard Dropout to Tech Visionary

• by history tools
• March 26, 2024

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg demonstrated a gifted intellect and intense focus from childhood. Born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg displayed an uncanny ability to hyperfocus and taught himself computer programming at the age of 10. His father, a dentist named Edward Zuckerberg, recalled his son‘s determination to absorb everything he could about a topic in short periods of intense concentration.

Zuckerberg first tapped into his budding technical skills to help connect his family when he built ZuckNet—a private instant messaging system for his father‘s home office and waiting room. Though simple, the feat offered a preview of Zuckerberg’s creative approach to coding and passion for building communication tools.

Nurturing a Budding Programming Prodigy

Recognizing their middle child‘s exceptional abilities, Zuckerberg’s parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to foster his skills. Over the next three years, Newman worked intensively with the young prodigy, teaching him more complex programming abilities and providing college-level instruction.

Zuckerberg put his expanding technical prowess to work by creating an artificial intelligence software program called Synapse Media Player while still in high school. The Spotify-like music recommendation engine attracted interest from major companies, including AOL and Microsoft, who looked into acquiring it and hiring the teenager behind it. Zuckerberg chose to keep ownership of Synapse and focus on his university studies.

At Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory high school in New Hampshire, Zuckerberg excelled academically and earned stellar SAT scores. He continued to program in his spare time, creating a version of the classic game Risk and developing several tools to help the Exeter community connect online.

Accepted to Harvard University in 2002, Zuckberg originally planned to major in psychology before eventually switching to computer science. As early signs of the boundary-breaking visionary to come, Zuckerberg created CourseMatch to help students choose classes based on others’ selections and Facemash, which controversially ranked students’ attractiveness.

Transforming Social Interaction with Facebook

As a sophomore computer science major in early 2004, Zuckerberg and classmates came together to work on the initial concept for an exclusive Harvard social network. While contributing to that foundational work, Zuckerberg quickly saw the opportunity for a social media platform with mainstream appeal.

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg purchased the web domain name facebook.com and began quietly building the site with a small group of Harvard friends. Utilizing his programming skills, the 19-year-old launched "The Facebook" from his dorm room on February 4, 2004 along with co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.

The social media platform delivered a radical new way for college students to connect online. Users could create personal profiles with photos, interests, relationship statuses and contact information while also interacting with schoolmates through messaging or posts.

Within 24 hours of launch, over 1,000 Harvard students registered for accounts. Over half the undergraduate population had profiles within the first month. Fueled by this viral adoption, The Facebook expanded to more Boston universities, the Ivy League network and eventually other universities.

Facebook‘s minimalist user interface when it launched at Harvard. Photo: Wayback Machine

The runaway success convinced Zuckerberg to take a leave of absence during his junior year to relocate operations from Harvard‘s dorms to Palo Alto, the heart of startup culture in Silicon Valley. He soon decided to drop out of university altogether at age 20 along with Moscovitz to dedicate all efforts towards his increasingly popular creation.

Speaking to Harvard’s student newspaper The Crimson about that pivotal choice in 2005, Zuckerberg showed conviction in his world-changing idea: "I knew that Facebook had to be complex and I wanted to maintain control over it, instead of just letting someone else build it for short-term gain."

Accelerating Growth and Innovations

In summer 2004, venture capital firm Accel led Facebook‘s $500,000 in Series A funding, valuing the company at $5 million. Zuckerberg used the infusion to hire more staff and switch to servers that could handle increasing traffic.

Over the next two years, Facebook unveiled updates including the news feed for scanning friends‘ activities, introduction of high schools networks, its first foreign office in London, and launch events to start building hype. An August 2006 redesign helped monthly users soar from around 6 million to 12 million.

As CEO, Zuckerberg facilitated key innovations in Facebook’s features and capabilities while pursuing an ambitious vision for its future. Some of the most pivotal offerings rolled out under his oversight include:

September 2006

• Everyone becomes part of one network with the News Feed May 2007
• Facebook Platform allows outside developers to build apps March 2009
• Facebook Connect opens the network to other websites

Zuckerberg also led multiple initiatives focused on improving internet accessibility around the world to enable more people to use Facebook. Internet.org, launched in 2013, aimed to make online services available to underserved locations by partnering with local mobile operators to offer resources free of data charges.

By driving mainstream adoption and an open ecosystem for third-party apps, Zuckerberg succeeded in establishing the first truly ubiquitous social technology. Facebook passed MySpace in 2008 to become the world’s most-used social media platform with 100 million active users and transformed Zuckerberg into one of tech‘s youngest billionaires.

Buying Out the Competition

As Facebook attracted more monthly active users every year, Zuckerberg directed acquisitions of one-time rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate competitive threats.

In April 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion when the photo-sharing app had 30 million users, but showed fast growth. Critics viewed the astronomical price tag as excessive, especially given Instagram‘s lack of revenue.

Zuckerberg saw deeper long-term value in integrating with Facebook’s social graph. The acquisition removed a competitor, gave Facebook ownership over Instagram’s data, and allowed easier photo integration into users’ feeds. Instagram‘s founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger promised users the apps would remain separate.

However, Zuckerberg increasingly pushed integration like requiring Instagram accounts use Facebook login credentials. Critics argue this was mainly to funnel more user data back to Facebook.

Facebook followed its largest acquisition to date by purchasing global communication service WhatsApp in 2014 at the eye-popping cost of over $19 billion ($40 per user). Via these ambitious and aggressive moves, Zuckerberg ushered Facebook into a dominant position with ownership over four of the world’s biggest messaging apps.

Facebook‘s annual revenue skyrocketed after its IPO. Chart: History Computer.

The Road to Wall Street Riches

Zuckerberg always maintained that realizing his vision mattered far more than money. But Facebook‘s rising valuation meant its CEO joined the ranks of the richest people in tech and the world.

In 2005, Zuckerberg rejected Yahoo’s acquisition offer of $1 billion likely because he wasn’t ready to abandon his creation or leadership role. Microsoft reportedly later made a $15 billion bid which did not entice Facebook either.

In September 2006, Facebook accepted $500 million from Microsoft at a $15 billion total valuation. The deal gave Microsoft 1.6% ownership of Facebook and lined Zuckerberg’s pockets with $240 million based on his ownership stake.

On May 18, 2012, eight years after launching in Harvard’s dorms, Facebook held one of tech’s largest ever public offerings. Its IPO raised $16 billion, valuing the company at $104 billion and making billionaires out of Zuckerberg and early executives.

Zuckerberg has since hovered between 3rd to 5th richest person in the world with a net worth of $67 billion as of July 2022. He‘s used those riches to buy houses in Palo Alto, San Francisco and Kauai, Hawaii while also signing Bill Gates and Warren Buffet‘s Giving Pledge in 2010.

Buying Future Success with Meta Platforms Rebrand

After almost 20 years focused strictly on software, Zuckerberg enacted one of his most shocking pivots by steering Facebook towards hardware for creating immersive digital worlds full of avatars and 3D environments.

In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion to drive more investment into virtual reality technology and products. Follow-up purchases expanded Facebook‘s AR/VR holdings and staff dedicated to building device experiences.

Speaking at Oculus Connect that year, Zuckerberg shared his futuristic vision:

“After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences…Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face just by putting on goggles in your home.”

The pursuit of that goal drove Facebook to take on a new corporate identity more aligned with Zuckerberg‘s vision for the coming digital age. On October 28, 2021, Zuckerberg revealed Facebook would rebrand as Meta Platforms to reflect its focus on bringing the "metaverse" to life.

Meta‘s Facebook Reality Labs division combines Oculus, augmented reality innovation, and future headset hardware into one AR/VR entity. Experts believe Zuckerberg chose this expensive gamble because Meta‘s social media business shows signs of plateauing.

Buying Oculus, investing billions into custom silicon and display tech, and rebranding to Meta all underscore Zuckerberg‘s belief that the next computing revolution will happen in shared 3D worlds. If he succeeds, it may cement his legacy as a transformative Silicon Valley icon.

Balancing Innovation Leadership, Personal Values and Controversies

Throughout his tenure guiding the Facebook juggernaut, Zuckerberg earned respect as a leader who moves boldly and builds for the long-term. However, his relentless fixation on global growth at all costs has resulted in questionable privacy practices, dangerous amplification of misinformation, and accusations of monopolistic business tactics.

Zuckerberg exercises near complete control as CEO/chairman with majority voting shares despite owning just 28% of total stock. Early on, Zuckerberg spoke about Facebook‘s mission to make the world more open and connected. Yet critics argue Facebook‘s actual business practices too often diverge from users‘ interests.

Facebook earned the bulk of its profits by monetizing data about people‘s behaviors, interests and demographics. But oversight missteps enabled malfeasance like Cambridge Analytica weaponizing that data for political ads.

The platform‘s core news feed also excessively pushed viral "clickbait" to boost engagement over meaningful content. Experts criticized Facebook‘s failure to safeguard elections from misinformation campaigns. Democracies faced rising extremism and divisions due to the algorithms optimized for outrage.

When confronted over such risks directly enabled by Facebook technology, Zuckerberg defaulted to familiar talking points:

• Greater connectivity brings people together.
• Misuse is only a small fraction of activity.
• Addressing flaws is highly complex.

Facebook shareholders and former employees argue the CEO-controlled board structure limits accountability regarding toxic impacts. And Zuckerberg often remains either silent or slow to engage major controversies related to data abuses, misinformation spread, and anticompetitive acquisition practices.

Criticisms Mount as Power Grows

In July 2020, Zuckerberg had to testify before Congress on anti-competitive practices along with other Big Tech CEOs. Lawmakers questioned acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp that removed future rivals which could have challenged Facebook‘s dominance in social media. Zuckerberg claimed the services were acquired legally and benefit consumers.

Facebook also faces antitrust charges filed in late 2020 from the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states. The lawsuits call for Facebook to potentially unwind the Instagram and WhatsApp deals. If successful, the effort would constitute the biggest check on Zuckerberg‘s power to date.

On September 13, 2021, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Facebook knew Instagram posed mental health dangers for teen girls obsessed with body image and measuring their worth through "likes." Nevertheless, Facebook moved forward with a version of Instagram for even younger children.

Fallout from the scandal and pressure from lawmakers forced Zuckerberg to pause work on Instagram Kids. The relentless cycle of transparency issues further hurts public faith in Zuckerberg‘s leadership.

Zuckerberg the Billionaire Philanthropist

Despite reputational hits and calls for accountability, Zuckerberg continues directing FB’s trajectory with unilateral authority. Though he‘s pledged to donate 99% of his Facebook shares through philanthropic initiatives, Zuckerberg still retains control via a special class of shares.

In December 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan announced the launch of their philanthropic initiative, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The limited liability company aims to advance human potential and equality through projects in education, science. and criminal justice reform.

CZI originally planned to focus efforts over Zuckerberg‘s lifetime before distributing remaining funds to fulfill their Giving Pledge. However, financial statements later confirmed CZI will not strictly act as a philanthropic venture and retains flexibility to make political donations and investments seeking returns.

Balancing Tech Visionary Goals with Real-World Family

At age 28 in May 2012, Zuckerberg married Priscilla Chan during a surprise backyard ceremony at their Palo Alto rental home, which also doubled as Facebook’s first headquarters. He proposed to Chan, a long-time girlfriend he met at a Harvard fraternity party, weeks after Facebook went public.

In June 2015, Zuckerberg announced the arrival of the couple’s first child, Max, followed by daughter August two years later. He vowed to take two months off for both births, part of leading by example on parental leave policy.

The famous workaholic still invests 80-to-90 hour weeks pushing Meta’s vision. Nevertheless, he embraces fatherhood on his own terms, teaching Max Mandarin and coding. Zuckerberg even built Jarvis, an AI voice assistant to control appliances and security, take family photos and simplify his home life as a busy exec.

Zuckerberg remains one of the most polarizing technology luminaries reshaping society. Supporters revere his innovation leadership and critics condemn his profitable indifference to real-world harm. At just 38 years old and astride a dominant social media platform evolving into a so-called “metaverse company”, Zuckerberg will continue wielding unmatched influence over billions of digital lives.

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How Mark Zuckerberg Changed the World and Won Time's 2010 "Person of the World"

In 2010, the 26-year-old Facebook founder recreated how humans communicated. Company biographer David Kirkpatrick gives 10 reasons he deserves Time's Person of the Year.

David Kirkpatrick

PRNewsFoto / AP Photo

Many ask whether at a mere 26, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could possibly merit being named Person of the Year by Time magazine. For them it's like Obama getting the Nobel Prize in the first year of his presidency. Perhaps merited, but premature.

From my vantagepoint, having chronicled Facebook and Zuckerberg's story, there is irrefutable logic in recognizing Zuckerberg's uniquely historic impact on the world. A legitimate question remains—should it have been this year?—but only because I suspect that he will likely have even more impact next year. And perhaps more after that.

Still, 2010 was monumental for Zuckerberg. Here are 10 reasons why:

1) Facebook added 250 million new users, reaching more than 600 million in just seven years—an unprecedented achievement, the fastest-growing company of any type in human history. It surpassed Google as the Web's top destination.

2) The service was Zuckerberg's idea and creation. No matter what story The Social Network might pretend to tell, he singlehandedly conceived and initiated Facebook. I emailed the most important early co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate (whose own role is drastically downplayed in the movie), to ask what he thought of Time's designation. His reply: "With my very naive interpretation of what Man of the Year means, I do think he deserved it, sure."

3) Facebook is transforming lives globally. It operates in about 100 languages. The second largest country there (after the U.S.) is Indonesia, with 30 million active users, according to the Facebook Global Monitor, published by Inside Network. The Monitor in November reported that more than 10 percent of the population uses Facebook in 51 countries.

4) This is a fundamentally new form of communication. In every medium that preceded it, we "sent" a message to another person—telegram, phone call, email, text. But on Facebook you merely do something. The software figures out who sees it. It is the first time real automation has come to mass human communication.

5) Zuckerberg, as CEO, has always had absolute and total control over the evolution of this stunningly successful operation. He controls three of five board seats, and thus cannot be dislodged or overruled. Facebook really is a reflection of his will and his vision.

“With my very naive interpretation of what Man of the Year means,” says Facebook cofounder Dustin Moscovitz, “I do think he deserved it, sure.”

6) His commitment to the service over his own short-term self-interest was proven in late 2007 when he turned down an offer from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to buy Facebook for $15 billion. He would have personally taken home about $4 billion at age 23, but didn't even consider accepting the offer.

7) With a personal net worth of around $10 billion, based on the price of recent sales of Facebook stock in private markets (the company is not yet public), his personal business achievement surpasses anyone his age, ever.

8) Facebook has enormous impact in diverse realms—including politics, media, marketing, privacy, our sense of identity, and our definition of friendship. Its use as a political tool by its members, for example, has shaken politics in countries including Iran, Colombia, Egypt, and Italy.

9) Facebook's impact on the Internet has continued to broaden even outside its own servers. Over 2 million websites now use various aspects of Facebook's software platform, aiming to capture some of the viral communications power that Facebook uniquely makes possible. These platform tools include the "like" button now increasingly ubiquitous across the Web (including the widget next to this very story).

10) Zuckerberg pushes Facebook to continually change and improve its product, and that has kept it growing and relevant. In April, the company dramatically extended its platform. In August, it created a new location-based service called "Facebook Places" which enables users to tell friends and businesses where they are. In November, it announced a radical new form of messaging which many experts believe will replace email for hundreds of millions. In addition, throughout the year it grew its "Facebook credits" product to become the primary way people spend money in games on the service. Credits could become a sort of global money inside the walls of Facebook. And a landmark Skype partnership announced in October could make the process of making a voice or video call dramatically easier—who needs to remember numbers when you will be able to just click on a name in your Facebook friend list?

Given the increasing pace of developments surrounding Facebook, it's possible a similar list a year from now will be even more dramatic. Naming any one person Person of the Year is intrinsically arbitrary and subjective. But Mark Zuckerberg deserves it as much as anyone.

David Kirkpatrick writes about technology for the Daily Beast. A former Fortune reporter, he is the author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World .

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Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is a former Harvard computer science student who along with a few friends launched Facebook, the world's most popular social network, in February 2004. Zuckerberg also has the distinction of being the world's youngest billionaire, which he achieved in 2008 at the age of 24. He was named "Man of the Year" by Time magazine in 2010. Zuckerberg currently is the chief executive officer and president of Facebook.

Fast Facts: Mark Zuckerberg

• Known For : Chief executive officer, president, and founder of Facebook, youngest billionaire
• Born : May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York
• Parents : Edward and Karen Zuckerberg
• Education : Phillips Exeter Academy, attended Harvard
• Published Works : CourseWork, Synapse, FaceMash, Facebook
• Awards : Time magazine's 2010 Man of the Year
• Spouse : Priscilla Chan (m. 2012)
• Children : Maxima Chan Zuckerberg, August Chan Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, the second of four children born to dentist Edward Zuckerberg and his wife, psychiatrist Karen Zuckerberg. Mark and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a sleepy, well-to-do town on the eastern bank of the Hudson River.

Zuckerberg began using and programming computers in middle school, with the active support of his father. Edward taught the 11-year-old Mark Atari BASIC , and then hired a software developer David Newman to give his son private lessons. In 1997 when Mark was 13, he created a computer network for his family he called ZuckNet, which allowed the computers in his home and his father's dental office to communicate via Ping, a primitive version of AOL's Instant Messenger that came out in 1998. He also developed computer games, such as a computer version of Monopoly and a version of Risk set in the Roman Empire.

Early Computing

For two years, Zuckerberg attended public high school Ardsley and then transferred to the Phillips Exeter Academy, where he excelled in classical studies and science. He won prizes for math, astronomy, and physics. By his high school graduation, Zuckerberg could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek.

For his senior project at Exeter, Zuckerberg wrote a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits and recommend other music. He posted it online on AOL and it received thousands of positive reviews. Both Microsoft and AOL offered to buy Synapse for $1 million and hire Mark Zuckerberg as a developer, but he turned them both down and instead enrolled at Harvard University in September 2002.

Harvard University

Mark Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he studied psychology and computer science. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program he called Course Match, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups .

He also invented Facemash, a program with the stated purpose of finding out who was the most attractive person on campus. Users would look at two pictures of people of the same sex and pick which was the "hottest," and the software compiled and ranked the results. It was an astounding success, but it bogged down the network at Harvard, people's pictures were being used without their permission, and it was offensive to people, particularly women's groups, on campus. Zuckerberg ended the project and apologized to the women's groups, saying he thought of it as a computer experiment. Harvard put him on probation.

Inventing Facebook

Zuckerberg's roommates at Harvard included Chris Hughes, a literature and history major; Billy Olson, a theater major; and Dustin Moskovitz, who was studying economics. There is no doubt that the conversational stew that occurred among them spurred and enhanced many of the ideas and projects that Zuckerberg was working on.

While at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg founded TheFacebook, an application intended to be a reliable directory based on real information about students at Harvard. That software eventually led to the February 2004 launch of Facebook .

Marriage and Family

In his second year of college at Harvard University , Zuckerberg met medical student Priscilla Chan. In September 2010, Zuckerberg and Chan began living together, and on May 19, 2012, they were married. Today, Chan is a pediatrician and philanthropist. The couple has two children, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg (born December 1, 2015) and August Chan Zuckerberg (born August 28, 2017).

The Zuckerberg family is of Jewish heritage, although Mark has stated he is an atheist. As of 2019, Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth was estimated to be more than $60 billion. Together, he and his wife founded the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to leverage technology to support the aims of science, education, justice, and opportunity. 

Mark is currently president and chief executive officer of Facebook and works at the company's office in Menlo Park, California. Other company executives include chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief financial officer Mike Ebersman.

Zuckerberg Quotes

"By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent."

"When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power."

"The web is at a really important turning point right now. Up until recently, the default on the web has been that most things aren’t social and most things don’t use your real identity. We’re building toward a web where the default is social."

• An Interview with Mark Zuckerberg . Time Magazine.
• Mark Zuckerberg Interview, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer.
• Amidon Lüsted, Marcia. "Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Creator." Edina, Minnesota: ABDO Publishing Company, 2012.
• Kirkpatrick, David. "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Computer That Is Connecting the World." New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
• Lessig, Lawrence. "Sorkin Vs. Zuckerberg." The New Republic, 30 Sept 2010.
• McNeill, Laurie. " There Is No 'I' in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography ." Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82.
• Schwartz, John. " No Stopping Movie View of Mark Zuckerberg ." The New York Times 3 Oct 2010.
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• Frederic August Bartholdi: The Man Behind Lady Liberty
• Great Father-Son Inventor Duos
• Who Invented the Mark I Computer?
• Women Inventors A to Z
• Biography of Humphry Davy, Prominent English Chemist
• Biography of Gordon Moore
• Biography of Konrad Zuse, Inventor and Programmer of Early Computers
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“I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose,” said Mark Zuckerberg, who was the principal speaker at Harvard’s 366th Commencement on May 25.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard

President Faust, Board of Overseers, faculty, alumni, friends, proud parents, members of the ad board, and graduates of the greatest university in the world,

I’m honored to be with you today because, let’s face it, you accomplished something I never could. If I get through this speech, it’ll be the first time I actually finish something at Harvard. Class of 2017, congratulations!

I’m an unlikely speaker, not just because I dropped out, but because we’re technically in the same generation. We walked this yard less than a decade apart, studied the same ideas and slept through the same Ec10 lectures. We may have taken different paths to get here, especially if you came all the way from the Quad, but today I want to share what I’ve learned about our generation and the world we’re building together.

But first, the last couple of days have brought back a lot of good memories.

How many of you remember exactly what you were doing when you got that email telling you that you got into Harvard? I was playing Civilization and I ran downstairs, got my dad, and for some reason, his reaction was to video me opening the email. That could have been a really sad video. I swear getting into Harvard is still the thing my parents are most proud of me for.

What about your first lecture at Harvard? Mine was Computer Science 121 with the incredible Harry Lewis. I was late so I threw on a t-shirt and didn’t realize until afterwards it was inside out and backwards with my tag sticking out the front. I couldn’t figure out why no one would talk to me — except one guy, KX Jin, he just went with it. We ended up doing our problem sets together, and now he runs a big part of Facebook. And that, Class of 2017, is why you should be nice to people.

But my best memory from Harvard was meeting Priscilla. I had just launched this prank website Facemash, and the ad board wanted to “see me”. Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out. My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going away party. As luck would have it, Priscilla was at that party with her friend. We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: “I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly.”

Actually, any of you graduating can use that line.

I didn’t end up getting kicked out — I did that to myself. Priscilla and I started dating. And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t. But without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life, so you could say it was the most important thing I built in my time here.

We’ve all started lifelong friendships here, and some of us even families. That’s why I’m so grateful to this place. Thanks, Harvard.

Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

One of my favorite stories is when John F Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.

You’re graduating at a time when this is especially important. When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.

As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go. I’ve met factory workers who know their old jobs aren’t coming back and are trying to find their place.

To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose.

I remember the night I launched Facebook from my little dorm in Kirkland House. I went to Noch’s with my friend KX. I remember telling him I was excited to connect the Harvard community, but one day someone would connect the whole world.

The thing is, it never even occurred to me that someone might be us. We were just college kids. We didn’t know anything about that. There were all these big technology companies with resources. I just assumed one of them would do it. But this idea was so clear to us — that all people want to connect. So we just kept moving forward, day by day.

I know a lot of you will have your own stories just like this. A change in the world that seems so clear you’re sure someone else will do it. But they won’t. You will.

But it’s not enough to have purpose yourself. You have to create a sense of purpose for others.

I found that out the hard way. You see, my hope was never to build a company, but to make an impact. And as all these people started joining us, I just assumed that’s what they cared about too, so I never explained what I hoped we’d build.

A couple years in, some big companies wanted to buy us. I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to see if we could connect more people. We were building the first News Feed, and I thought if we could just launch this, it could change how we learn about the world.

Nearly everyone else wanted to sell. Without a sense of higher purpose, this was the startup dream come true. It tore our company apart. After one tense argument, an advisor told me if I didn’t agree to sell, I would regret the decision for the rest of my life. Relationships were so frayed that within a year or so every single person on the management team was gone.

That was my hardest time leading Facebook. I believed in what we were doing, but I felt alone. And worse, it was my fault. I wondered if I was just wrong, an imposter, a 22 year-old kid who had no idea how the world worked.

Now, years later, I understand that *is* how things work with no sense of higher purpose. It’s up to us to create it so we can all keep moving forward together.

Today I want to talk about three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world.

First, let’s take on big meaningful projects.

Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together.

Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon – including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects.

These projects didn’t just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things.

Now it’s our turn to do great things. I know, you’re probably thinking: I don’t know how to build a dam, or get a million people involved in anything.

But let me tell you a secret: no one does when they begin. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.

If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook.

Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started. Oh, you know what else movies get wrong about innovation? No one writes math formulas on glass. That’s not a thing.

It’s good to be idealistic. But be prepared to be misunderstood. Anyone working on a big vision will get called crazy, even if you end up right. Anyone working on a complex problem will get blamed for not fully understanding the challenge, even though it’s impossible to know everything upfront. Anyone taking initiative will get criticized for moving too fast, because there’s always someone who wants to slow you down.

In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.

So what are we waiting for? It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place. That makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online, and personalizing education so everyone can learn?

These achievements are within our reach. Let’s do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role. Let’s do big things, not only to create progress, but to create purpose.

So taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose.

Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers. Now we’re all entrepreneurial, whether we’re starting projects or finding or role. And that’s great. Our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress.

Now, an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn’t the first thing I built. I also built games, chat systems, study tools and music players. I’m not alone. JK Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.

But today, we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone. When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose. Right now our society is way over-indexed on rewarding success and we don’t do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots.

Let’s face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Look, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I don’t know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they might not make enough money. But I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.

We all know we don’t succeed just by having a good idea or working hard. We succeed by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.

Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.

We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable childcare to get to work and healthcare that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as technology keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives.

And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.

That’s why Priscilla and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation. It was never a question of if we were going to do this. The only question was when.

Millennials are already one of the most charitable generations in history. In one year, three of four US millennials made a donation and seven out of ten raised money for charity.

But it’s not just about money. You can also give time. I promise you, if you take an hour or two a week — that’s all it takes to give someone a hand, to help them reach their potential.

Maybe you think that’s too much time. I used to. When Priscilla graduated from Harvard she became a teacher, and before she’d do education work with me, she told me I needed to teach a class. I complained: “Well, I’m kind of busy. I’m running this company.” But she insisted, so I taught a middle school program on entrepreneurship at the local Boys and Girls Club.

I taught them lessons on product development and marketing, and they taught me what it’s like feeling targeted for your race and having a family member in prison. I shared stories from my time in school, and they shared their hope of one day going to college too. For five years now, I’ve been having dinner with those kids every month. One of them threw me and Priscilla our first baby shower. And next year they’re going to college. Every one of them. First in their families.

We can all make time to give someone a hand. Let’s give everyone the freedom to pursue their purpose — not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because when more people can turn their dreams into something great, we’re all better for it.

Purpose doesn’t only come from work. The third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community. And when our generation says “everyone”, we mean everyone in the world.

Quick show of hands: how many of you are from another country? Now, how many of you are friends with one of these folks? Now we’re talking. We have grown up connected.

In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn’t nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was “citizen of the world”. That’s a big deal.

Every generation expands the circle of people we consider “one of us”. For us, it now encompasses the entire world.

We understand the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations — to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.

We get that our greatest opportunities are now global — we can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics. Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.

But we live in an unstable time. There are people left behind by globalization across the world. It’s hard to care about people in other places if we don’t feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards.

This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration against those who would slow them down. This is not a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. There are people in every country for global connection and good people against it.

This isn’t going to be decided at the UN either. It’s going to happen at the local level, when enough of us feel a sense of purpose and stability in our own lives that we can open up and start caring about everyone. The best way to do that is to start building local communities right now.

We all get meaning from our communities. Whether our communities are houses or sports teams, churches or music groups, they give us that sense we are part of something bigger, that we are not alone; they give us the strength to expand our horizons.

That’s why it’s so striking that for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find purpose somewhere else.

But I know we can rebuild our communities and start new ones because many of you already are.

I met Agnes Igoye, who’s graduating today. Where are you, Agnes? She spent her childhood navigating conflict zones in Uganda, and now she trains thousands of law enforcement officers to keep communities safe.

I met Kayla Oakley and Niha Jain, graduating today, too. Stand up. Kayla and Niha started a non-profit that connects people suffering from illnesses with people in their communities willing to help.

I met David Razu Aznar, graduating from the Kennedy School today. David, stand up. He’s a former city councilor who successfully led the battle to make Mexico City the first Latin American city to pass marriage equality — even before San Francisco.

This is my story too. A student in a dorm room, connecting one community at a time, and keeping at it until one day we connect the whole world.

Change starts local. Even global changes start small — with people like us. In our generation, the struggle of whether we connect more, whether we achieve our biggest opportunities, comes down to this — your ability to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose.

Class of 2017, you are graduating into a world that needs purpose. It’s up to you to create it.

Now, you may be thinking: can I really do this?

Remember when I told you about that class I taught at the Boys and Girls Club? One day after class I was talking to them about college, and one of my top students raised his hand and said he wasn’t sure he could go because he’s undocumented. He didn’t know if they’d let him in.

Last year I took him out to breakfast for his birthday. I wanted to get him a present, so I asked him and he started talking about students he saw struggling and said “You know, I’d really just like a book on social justice.”

I was blown away. Here’s a young guy who has every reason to be cynical. He didn’t know if the country he calls home — the only one he’s known — would deny him his dream of going to college. But he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t even thinking of himself. He has a greater sense of purpose, and he’s going to bring people along with him.

It says something about our current situation that I can’t even say his name because I don’t want to put him at risk. But if a high school senior who doesn’t know what the future holds can do his part to move the world forward, then we owe it to the world to do our part too.

Before you walk out those gates one last time, as we sit in front of Memorial Church, I am reminded of a prayer, Mi Shebeirach, that I say whenever I face a challenge, that I sing to my daughter thinking about her future when I tuck her into bed. It goes:

“May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us, help us *find the courage* to make our lives a blessing.”

I hope you find the courage to make your life a blessing.

Congratulations, Class of ’17! Good luck out there.

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What it Takes to Get Into Harvard: The Story of Mark Zuckerberg

February 25, 2019

It’s an age-old question: What does it take to get into Harvard? The university’s admissions process has been analyzed by many. And every year, thousands of students wonder if they have what Harvard seeks.

While there’s no one thing that will make you a shoo-in for Harvard, you will want to build your profile strategically if you’ve set your sights on the top schools. To understand   what it takes to get into Harvard , I’m going to walk you through the story of Mark Zuckerberg. While his time at Harvard was short-lived, his background can help you grasp the kind of “it” factor that you’ll need.

Passion and Initiative

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get into Harvard because he was a prodigy. He got into Harvard because he mastered a serious interest in which he showed exceptional ability.

Now an inescapable influence on our media-scape, Zuckerberg did not apply to Harvard with the legendary title “Creator of Facebook and One of the Globe’s Youngest CEO’s” stamped below his name. But his long-term interest software programs was already impressive.

Tinkering with computers starting in middle school, Zuckerberg built devices for both practical and entertainment purposes. At age 12, he adapted his Atari game-player to create a messaging program—“Zucknet”—that his dad, a dentist, could use for inter-office communication.

Zuckerberg also invited people around him to share inspirations for new projects. Counting a number of artists as his friends, he would ask them to draw their ideas so that he could build computer games from them. Zuckerberg’s parents recognized that their son was looking for every opportunity to see what he could make with computers, so they hired a private tutor, David Newman, to hone his progress. Soon he was also taking classes at nearby Mercy College (a private university in Dobbs Ferry, NY).

Notice that Zuckerberg was not just exhibiting passion. He was   doing things   to deepen his interest, challenge himself, and extend his talent while creating tangible products. And that’s exactly what you need to do: explore an interest and go deep with it. If you’re wondering   what it takes to get into Harvard , take a passion and make it your own. Initiative and creativity will give you a shot at standing out in the Harvard applicant pool.

Undeniable Impressiveness

If you want to know   what it takes to get into Harvard , know that sheer impressiveness goes a long way. The next step that Zuckerberg took was the most ambitious yet.

While he was still in high school (Ardsley High School for his freshman and sophomore years, then transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy), Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D’Angelo started a company called Intelligent Media Group and created “Synapse,” an MP3 player that selected songs for users by keeping track of their listening habits.

Released in September 2002, Synapse was reviewed in   PC Magazine   and the technology newsgroup slashdot.org. Zuckerberg made national news when Microsoft, seeking to outbid other major technology companies, offered to purchase the technology and hire the creators—an offer that Zuckerberg turned down!  Making national headlines creates an instant “wow” factor.

You may be thinking that because Microsoft hasn’t approached you yet, you don’t have   what it takes to get into Harvard . That is not the case. Many students start their own companies in high school, some gaining entrepreneurial skills first through   internships . The companies they create may not make it onto the pages of national magazines, but local newspapers,   blogs , and online newsgroups often cover them. Most importantly, founding and running companies gives students the opportunity to show their interest, a level of mastery within it, and gain experiences that will convert to intriguing, credible applications.

Imagine being in the enviable position of writing application essays with Zuckerberg’s experience. You don’t have to emphasize or exaggerate your passion because it shows. You’re able to write about hands-on leadership situations and show new results for which you have genuine stories to tell. What you love should shine through in a clear, genuine, and compelling way. That’s   what it takes to get into Harvard .

Zuckerberg’s achievements in Computer Science were clear, but he also had depth and academic prowess in non-STEM fields, particularly classical languages.

Excelling in classics at Ardsley, he carried his studies with him to Phillips Exeter, where he would earn a diploma in the subject. On his college application, he was able to state that he could read and write in   three   classical languages: Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. It would be a fascinating question to ask whether his facility with alphabetical languages sparked his interest in programming languages!

It’s striking that Zuckerberg applied to Harvard with impressive accomplishments in both STEM and humanities fields. Though he was accepted as a prospective CS major, he could not be put in a “CS only” box. He had a lively mind, capable of balancing and excelling in subjects that many observers would not stereotypically associate with the same student. If you want Harvard to take notice, showcase your intellectual curiosity at the forefront. While you must be focused, you also want to be a dynamic candidate with stories about different pursuits.

So, What   Does   It Take to Get Into Harvard?

How did Mark Zuckerberg get into Harvard? Beyond passion, talent, and curiosity, Zuckerberg was a compelling candidate for the most selective schools in the country because he had   accomplishments   that reflected long-term and focused interests as well as exceptional levels of   mastery   in each. This gave his work credibility and his stories depth.

You do not need to make Microsoft knock at your door before you’re eighteen, but you can take measures to develop the kinds of qualities that Mark Zuckerberg exemplified as a candidate for college admissions. Taking those steps won’t guarantee admission to Harvard, but they can make Harvard want to know more about you.

Further Reading:

• https://www.biography.com/people/mark-zuckerberg-507402
• http://www.eduinreview.com/blog/2010/12/mark-zuckerbergs-education-background/
• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artificial-intelligence-for-his-high-school/
• Cal Newport.   How To Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out).   New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010.

Tags : college admissions tips , Harvard , harvard admissions process , how to get into harvard , how to get into the ivy league , mark zuckerberg

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Power Is Unprecedented

It’s not just the extent of his influence—it’s the nature of it.

The Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes made a personal, riveting case for breaking up Facebook in a new essay published in The New York Times today. His argument hinges on the idea that Mark Zuckerberg is a “good, kind person” but one whose “power is unprecedented and un-American” and whose “influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.”

A major, if not the , reason to break up Facebook is that, as the philosopher Kanye West once put it: “ No one man should have all that power .” What makes the situation complicated, however, is that the type of power Mark Zuckerberg holds is what’s actually unprecedented.

In the terms of traditional power, Facebook and its CEO are not overwhelming by historical or contemporary standards. Militarily, of course, Facebook is a nonentity. Zuckerberg commands no world-class army, which ranks him significantly below Chinese, American, and Russian leaders. Politically, Zuckerberg has no base, and despite being very famous , is quite unpopular . Culturally, Zuckerberg does not have the mystique of Steve Jobs, nor has his philanthropy turned him into a wise nobleman like Bill Gates ( not yet, anyway ). Financially, his personal fortune is among the world’s top 10 , but there are a lot of other billionaires with comparable fortunes, from the space enthusiast Jeff Bezos to the many children of very successful businesspeople.

Read: Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough

Even Zuckerberg’s company, measured by traditional means, is merely strong. Facebook is not among the top 75 revenue-generating companies . It has roughly as many employees as the Arizona mining company Freeport-McMoran and the steelmaker Nucor, or roughly 0.01 percent as many as Walmart. Facebook’s profits land it in the top 15 companies, and its market value is in the top 10 on its perceived potential for growth. Taken as a whole in the context of the global economy, Facebook looks like a very profitable, high-potential company, but it does not stand out on any one metric. (The Saudi oil company Aramco, for example, generated $224 billion in profits in 2018 .)

But few companies are as tightly controlled by one person as Facebook is. The company came of age during an era of Silicon Valley in which founders retained remarkable control over their enterprises. By creating different classes of shares with different voting power, Zuckerberg has retained operational control while still selling shares of his company. “Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares ,” Hughes notes in the essay. Even the Ford family, which famously created an unusual dual-class share structure in the 1930s , only holds 40 percent voting control of the company. When it comes to Walmart, another unusually closely held operation , the Walton family owns fewer than 50 percent. And these are families, with their own conflicts and competing interests. Zuckerberg is both the chief executive and holds the majority of voting shares. There is no institutional check on Zuckerberg.

Yet his power is great. Hughes is correct that we’ve never seen anything like it. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—three of the five most popular communication tools on the planet, alongside Alphabet’s YouTube and Tencent’s WeChat. In many countries, Zuckerberg’s products are the internet . They are the media for information dispersal—like a newspaper or television channel—as well as for peer-to-peer communications, like an old-school telecom network. They are also a crucial ligature for small businesses, as internet home, customer-service desk, and advertising platform, and for direct sales through tools such as Facebook Marketplace.

Who is Zuckerberg like? The best parallels might be the newspaper barons, such as William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch. But it’s more like if all three broadcast-television networks of the 20th century were owned by the same person, in one corporation that he completely controlled, and that also was the central venue for political speech and finding an electrician. Or maybe, as we’ve argued, he’ll be this generation’s Bob Moses , who, in his quest to remake New York, first acquired power through building, and then by any means necessary.

As Max Read has pointed out , no one can quite figure out what Facebook is, and by extension, no one really knows what Zuckerberg’s power could do. While Zuckerberg has been driven to dominate his corporate rivals, he has yet to use the power that he holds to do anything other than compete (that we know of, at least).

Read: Facebook uses still don’t know how Facebook works

What could an evil Zuckerberg do?

Because Facebook Inc. has developed the most sophisticated tools for predicting human behavior that the world has ever seen, and because its user bases are the largest in the world, the company could exert more persuasive power over more people than has ever been possible.

Facebook gets people to use its products, and it uses the actions that people take to manufacture more useful data about their tendencies, as Shoshana Zuboff has laid out in her book Surveillance Capitalism . That is to say, all the things we control about interactions with the empire—the friends we have, the photos we post, the text we write—are not the information that Facebook is after. These are the raw material for the machine-learning processes that generate Facebook’s real power: their ability to forecast what you’ll do when faced with a set of choices.

And that power is growing with both the data in the system and the development of the artificial intelligences that feed on it.

Even if Mark Zuckerberg has never used this power for anything other than getting me to buy sneakers, it probably is not a great idea for one person to have so much predictive capacity about the citizens of the world. That Zuckerberg has not done so might be the best argument for breaking up Facebook now —because it’s not too late.

Breaking up the company probably would not (immediately) solve the problems we’ve come to associate with the internet. Who knows, it could even exacerbate them. But it would take one major, underappreciated risk out of the future: that Mark Zuckerberg decides to wield the tremendous power he has so far eschewed.

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Mark Zuckerberg: Founder and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook)

Mark Zuckerberg is a self-taught computer programmer and co-founder, chair, and chief executive officer of Meta ( META ), formerly known as Facebook. Originally named Facemash, Zuckerberg founded the social networking site in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004 along with Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin.

According to Bloomberg , Zuckerberg's net worth as of June 10, 2022, was about $68.2 billion.

Key Takeaways

• Mark Zuckerberg is a self-taught computer programmer and the co-founder, chair, and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook).
• According to Bloomberg , Zuckerberg's net worth as of June 10, 2022, was about $68.2 billion.
• Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2022, making it the biggest social network in the world.
• In 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, founded the Chan Zuckerberg foundation with the goal of delivering "...personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities."
• In April 2018, Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill about Facebook's use of users' information, including the sharing of 87 million users' information to Cambridge Analytica.

Investopedia / Alison Czinkota

On May 14, 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York. As a child, he showed an affinity for computers. He learned the BASIC programming language at a nearby college, and at the age of 12, he developed an instant-messaging application that his father used in his office.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University but dropped out after his sophomore year to focus on developing Facebook. The site grew out of two earlier ventures: FaceMash, a website for ranking the attractiveness of other Harvard students, and HarvardConnection.com, an online social networking platform.

In 2004, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, the three credited founders of HarvardConnection.com, sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing intellectual property from the website. They reached a multi-million dollar settlement of cash and stock options in 2008. The Winklevoss twins tried to reopen the lawsuit in 2011, but the court denied their request.

Facebook IPO and Acquisitions

In mid-2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital and expanded access to hundreds of universities and high schools. One year later, the social network opened to the general public, and Yahoo! offered $1 billion to buy the company—a bid that was swiftly rejected by Zuckerberg.

In 2012, Facebook went public and became the most successful Internet initial public offering (IPO) in history when it raised $16 billion. That same year, Facebook bought the photo-sharing application Instagram, and Zuckerberg married Priscilla Chan in a surprise wedding the day after the IPO.

Meta has acquired dozens of companies over the years, including Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, WhatsApp for $22 billion in cash and shares in 2014, Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014, and several other companies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to identification platforms.

Wealth and Philanthropy

Zuckerberg has made headlines for his philanthropy , including his 2010 donation of $100 million to help schools in Newark, N.J. In 2014, the publication Philanthropy ranked Zuckerberg and Chan the most generous American donors of the previous year, after they donated 18 million shares of Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, in Mountain View, Calif.

On Dec. 1, 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan published a letter to their daughter Max, in which they announced the creation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative "to join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation."

In the post, Zuckerberg and Chan said the "initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities" and that "we will give 99% of our Facebook shares—currently about $45 billion—during our lives to advance this mission."

Controversy and Cambridge Analytica

Meta has been accused, nearly since its inception, of collecting and selling the personal data, posts, and instant messages of its users. These accusations mounted shortly after the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, with some alleging that U.S. voters had been under the influence of targeted ads financed by Russia. 

In March 2018, media outlets including The New York Times and The Observer reported that U.K.-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica  had paid an outside researcher to collect data on 50 million Facebook users without their permission . The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica's goal was to use the data for its trademark "psychographic modeling," with the aim of "reading voters' minds" and potentially influencing the outcome of elections. 

$25 Billion

The estimated ad revenue of Instagram in 2021.

In April 2018, Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users had been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, and not the 50 million as earlier reported.

Later that month, Zuckerberg appeared on Capitol Hill to testify before House and Senate committees about Facebook's use of consumer data. In prepared remarks before the Senate, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook had been beneficial in connecting people during the #MeToo movement and various disasters.

The statement went on to say that Zuckerberg and Facebook heard about Cambridge Analytica's involvement from the media, just like everyone else. Zuckerberg also outlined actions that Facebook intended to undertake to prevent future incidents of this nature, including "safeguarding our platform," "investigating other apps," and "building better controls."

How Does Facebook Make Money?

Facebook makes the bulk of its money through ads. The company sells ad space on its many platforms. These platforms include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Facebook (Meta) also makes money by allowing users to pay to promote their pages/posts on the various platforms, which is also a form of advertising.

What Is Mark Zuckerberg's Net Worth?

As of June 10, 2022, Mark Zuckerberg's net worth is $68.2 billion. He earned his wealth as the founder and largest shareholder of Meta (formerly Facebook).

Does Mark Zuckerberg Make $1 a Year?

Technically, Mark Zuckerberg makes a salary of $1 a year at Facebook. His wealth, however, is tied up in the shares of Meta (formerly Facebook), of which he is the largest shareholder, making him one of the richest men in the world.

Zuckerberg started Facebook from his dorm room, turning it into one of the largest companies in the world. Through Facebook and its many acquisitions, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg controls the majority of the way consumers consume content and interact with one another.

Bloomberg. " Mark Zuckerberg ."

Statista. " Number of Monthly Active Facebook Users Worldwide as of 1st Quarter 2022 ."

George Beahm. "Mark Zuckerberg: In His Own Words." Agate Publishing, 2018.

United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. " Facebook v. ConnectU, Inc. ," Pages 4902-4912.

Crunchbase. " Series A - Meta ."

Inc. " Peter Thiel Talks About the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion ."

History. " Facebook Raises $16 Billion in Largest Tech IPO in U.S. History ."

Meta. " Facebook to Acquire Oculus ."

Meta. " Facebook to Acquire Instagram ."

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. " Form 8-K - October 4, 2014 ."

Cision PR Newswire. " New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker Join With Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Advance a National Model for Improving Public Schools ."

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. " Letter to Max ."

Statista. " Instagram - Statistics & Facts ."

Meta. " An Update on Our Plans to Restrict Data Access on Facebook ."

U.S. Senate. " Hearing Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the United Sates Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation - April 10, 2018 - Testimony of Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Facebook ," Pages 1-3.

Business Insider. " Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Why He Only Makes $1 a Year ."

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Mark Zuckerberg: Leadership Style on Practice Report

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Leadership approach, principles and values, response to challenges, personal perspective, leadership learning.

One of the possible ways to become a good leader is to define several already successful leaders, study their biographies and experiences, and pay attention to the chosen leadership styles. Among the existing variety of excellent leaders with captivating ideas and approaches to leading people, it is impossible to avoid the name of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, one of the world’s youngest and wealthiest leaders.

He is a co-founder of Facebook, which is one of the most famous global social networks. His philanthropic ideals make him recognizable among other current leaders. Zuckerberg (as cited in Harris, 2012) explains that “by giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent” (p.101). There are many things that make Zuckerberg a prominent leader. The current paper aims at discussing the main aspects of his leadership style and the lessons that can be taken from his experience. Mark Zuckerberg is a bright example of how young people can become good leaders using their passion, desire to work, and attention to the details and people. It proves that transformational leadership is a unique way to rely on and become a significant figure in the world of business.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in a family of a dentist and a psychiatrist (Lüster, 2011). He is a second child among his three sisters. Being raised under harsh Jewish traditions and religious aspects, he became an atheist at the age of 13. I think that it was one of his first decisions that introduced him as a person of a free will. Another key issue of Zuckerberg’s biography is his entering Harvard University and meeting students like Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Andrew McCollum, who became the main supporters of his views (Lüster, 2011). Being a young student at Harvard, Zuckerberg created a program just for fun that was able to overwhelm the local network switches of Harvard and deprive all students from access to the Internet (Harris, 2012). After that case, he met the Winklevoss’s brothers and Divya Narendra, who introduced their ideas on a social network for Harvard students. With time, Zuckerberg took the brightest ideas from this group of people and created his own global network that conquered the world.

During the course, I got a chance to learn a number of leadership approaches that discussed interesting ways on how leaders should behave, think, and make decisions. Trait, skills, situational, and behavioral approaches amaze with their possibility to touch upon some aspects of a person and develop them to the required point (Northouse, 2010). However, transformational leadership impressed me with its ability to consider the worth of various charismatic and affective elements and combine them properly so that a leader and the followers get an opportunity to develop, succeed, and share personal ideas to achieve the main goals (Northouse, 2010). Though it was interesting to learn how leadership can become everyone’s business and pass the tests to identify my own readiness to leadership (Kouzes & Posner, 2003), I wanted to understand how real people could benefit from transformational leadership approach, and Mark Zuckerberg turned out to be the best example.

His passion and desire to work hard and achieve the goals play an important role in his professional and personal life. He offers a number of new interesting approaches to leadership and show people that age should not matter if there is a need to create something extraordinary. However, he does not focus on his abilities or challenges only. One of his powerful leadership aspects is the desire to help other people to achieve the best results and succeed in all activities using people’s potential, knowledge, and intentions. Passion for everything he does is the Zuckerberg’s thing. His ability to differ from other people without definite intentions to do so is what makes Zuckerberg extraordinary. The combination of his knowledge and abilities cannot even stand next to his real possibilities.

The principles and values chosen by Zuckerberg for his work impress with its controversy. On the one hand, Zuckerberg is introduced as a modest and generous leader with a desire to help his followers to achieve the highest points of their job. On the other hand, he makes people aggressive and encourages them to use any possible means to achieve the goals even if the means are not appropriate. As a transformational leader, Zuckerberg promotes changes in people and focuses on human emotions, values, standards, and long-term goals (Northouse, 2010). Zuckerberg makes an impossible thing: he uses the essence of transformational leadership that is the importance of the connection between people in work to increase motivation (Northouse, 2010) to introduce it as the core of the network he creates to provide people with a chance to communicate, share values, and be recognizable online.

The main principles according to which Zuckerberg works are strong communicative skills, the desire to debate to reach the truth or the best option, the necessity to have a vision and strive for it, and the ability to combine energy, enthusiasm, and support to achieve a goal. His main value is his passion for everything he tries to present. Every his program and message is a result of passionate solutions and emotions. That is why Facebook turns out to be interesting to many people around the whole globe: it is not only about the means to connect people, it is a possible to share feelings, emotions, and thoughts, a chance to be closer to people, who care each other, and a reason to combine real and virtual types of life without losing a core, human passion.

As any leader and a person, Zuckerberg faces some challenges from time and time and has to think about the best solutions with a minimum of losses, both financial and emotional. A good leader should not only focus on the achievements, success, or the necessity to organize different people. A good leader should be ready for all aspects of leadership, challenges, the necessity to make bad decisions, a possibility to make wrong decisions, and the ability to study on the mistakes and make corrections. The peculiar feature of the Zuckerberg’s style of leadership is his ability to recognize his weaknesses. He believes that it is normal for a person not to know something, and it is never bad to ask for help or some pieces of advice. A person cannot do everything by him/herself. It seems to be better to admit that something is unclear, and a kind of support is required than neglecting the fact of difficulty or lack of knowledge and continue working on a wrong basis or solution.

Zuckerberg teaches that debates and arguments are the key points in leadership. He is always ready to help people around him, explain his ideas, and introduce his vision till it is clear to everyone. His leadership is a kind of friendship with a good guide at hand. At the same time, he does not want to be accepted as a too loyal or too kind leader. Zuckerberg is able to identify the challenges of his work, inform about the necessity to work hard and for a long period, and explain the outcomes expected in the nearest future.

The results of the leadership style chosen by Zuckerberg are evident indeed. The name of Zuckerberg is known globally. At the age of 31, Zuckerberg wealth is about $38.6 billion. His IPO is probably one of biggest Internet offerings in history. His story becomes an example for many young people, who want to believe that they possess enough skills, ambitions, and knowledge to become successful and famous. Mark Zuckerberg shows one of the possible ways on how to become a leader neglecting his young age. He becomes a Person of the Year 2010 (Lussier & Achua, 2012). Nowadays, it is clear that successful leadership should not be based on practice only. It is possible to be a good leader having a little experience but a huge potential and the desire to work and help other people do the same. His decision to follow transformational leadership approach is correct indeed as it helps to focus on the current morals and ethics and pay attention to the opinions of people around, generate them, and introduce the best solution in a short period.

Mark Zuckerberg differentiates with his ability to use the skills of different people, combine the opportunities, and introduce a powerful idea to be achieved. His extraordinariness can be observed from different perspectives: he likes communicating with people, shares his points of view, listens to other opinions, evaluates the situations, and comes to the conclusions that impress. In fact, the evaluation of Zuckerberg’s achievements and his style of work helps me realize that his leadership does not contain any unique characteristics. He is the person with a number of demands, interests, and skills that can help to make the dreams come true. He does not want to lead people. What he does want is to help people be closer to each other, create the opportunities, and try to reduce poverty by means of communication that is possible globally.

Transformational leadership can be different from one person to another. The theory shows that true transformational leaders try to decline weak aspects and influence the followers in the best possible way using new possibilities (Lussier & Achua, 2012). The Zuckerberg’s example helps to understand how theory can be applied to practice. As a leader, Zuckerberg finds it necessary to focus on impact, think fast, and create a social value that does matter. At the same time, people should stay open and be closer to share information and true attitudes to the same things. Such perspectives should help to get to the truth and values that fulfill human lives. His intentions to donate and motivate other people do the same proves that his philanthropic attitude has to be appreciated and considered by good leaders, who want to become helpful and remarkable in the spheres they choose for work.

In general, the life of Mark Zuckerberg and the theoretical background about different leadership styles become an amazing experience for any potential and current leader. Research done on this person helps to realize that nothing can prevent a person with desire and abilities from achieving the goals set. Age, gender, race, and religion do not matter in case the question of leadership is raised. Zuckerberg and his team teach people how to cooperate, communicate, and achieve the goals that are clearly defined and set.

Harris, A.R. (2012). Facebook: The company and its founders. North Mankato, MI: ABDO.

Kouzes, J. & Posner, B. (2003). Leadership practices inventory (“LPI”) Self-Scoring Instrument . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Lussier, R. & Achua, C. (2012). Leadership: Theory, application, & skill development. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

Lüster, M.A. (2011). Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook creator . North Mankato, MI: ABDO.

Northouse, P. (2010). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

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Bibliography

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Home — Essay Samples — Business — Facebook — Mark Zukerberg’s Entrepreneurial story

Mark Zukerberg's Entrepreneurial Story

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Published: Oct 11, 2018

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Childhood biography, facemash – a fun site for voting, the rising of facebook, facebook logo, lawsuits against facebook, bill gates and facebook, how facebook makes money, acquisition of instagram, oculus rift, and whatsapp.

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Essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder of Facebook Media for Students and Children in English

February 18, 2021 by Prasanna

Essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media:  Facebook is an acclaimed, free person-to-person communication site that permits enlisted clients to make their profiles, transfer photographs and video, just as send messages and talk with companions, family and partners.

Loved ones would now be able to associate any place with one another in an organization of connections, sharing photographs and recordings, sending messages or message, playing random data tests and games, and by and large having easygoing everyday contact that is regularly troublesome because of geological distances and occupied ways of life. Facebook is presently accessible over 100 unique dialects that come from incredible works of volunteer interpreters worldwide.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Mark Zuckerberg the Founder Facebook Media for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder of Facebook Media of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic of Mark Zuckerberg the Founder of Facebook Media for reference.

Long Essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media is helpful to students of classes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.

Mark Zuckerberg began an informal communication site named Facebook in the year 2004. It was possibly the best person-to-person communication stage, which acquired a couple of billion clients within a couple of years. It is a stage where one can without much of a stretch interface with individuals having various nations. You can make new companions and make a gathering and keep having a discussion.

It is a stage that gives everyday reports on the ordinary happenings of the world. You can follow your venerated image and your most loved sportsperson on it too. It is likewise a stage where you can transfer your photos and your regular considerations. Your companions can put their assessment also on it.

Clients who will utilize Facebook need to enlist before utilizing the site. An individual who is thirteen years of age can enrol on Facebook and make new companions from all around the planet. It was not Mark Zuckerberg alone who began Facebook. He was upheld by his flatmates and software engineering understudies, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz. His companion Chris Hughes was additionally some assistance. The participation of this site was restricted to the Harvard understudies initially. At that point, it broadened its branches, and now pretty much every person on each side of the world hold a profile on Facebook. It has filled step by step in the previous few years and has developed effectively.

It is a free site, and nobody needs to pay for it to get enlisted. An individual necessity their email id or telephone number, and after check, the Facebook profile will be made. If we contrast Facebook with different sites, it is more trustable and safe since it is possibly the most acclaimed and consistently utilized site. Nonetheless, your profile may get hacked now and again, yet it tends to be recuperated in a matter of seconds.

It empowers an individual to keep in contact with each other, just by a simple message. Clients can likewise transfer a restricted measure of data about themselves. They can pick what they need to share about themselves. Facebook’s security settings are easy to use, and each client can change it as indicated by their solace mode. It is probably the ideal alternative to keep in contact with individuals. A steady web association is all you require. Be that as it may, it additionally has its disadvantages. A lot of anything isn’t acceptable. For understudies, particularly school-going understudies, steady utilization of Facebook can hamper their investigations. It very well may be an interruption now and again because it is such a stage that keeps you stuck on to it.

It very well may be the ideal approach to take a break, however returning to work is likewise vital. Everything has the right side and accompanies a lot of impediments. It is each individual’s decision about how they utilize the stage. They can utilize it beneficially and become more acquainted with individuals from various societies and places or squander their productive energy to keep themselves engaged.

Short Essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media 150 Words In English

Short Essay on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media is helpful to students of classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

The most well-known interpersonal interaction stage, Facebook, was made by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Innovation has improved so you can contact individuals living in an alternate country with only a single tick. Facebook permits people to keep in contact with their companions and friends and family with its high-level highlights. A steady web can do ponders. You can transfer your temperaments, your feelings, even some appropriately harsh criticism, just with the guide of Facebook. It isn’t just a stage to pull off your fatigue; many utilize it as a kind of revenue by selling their separate items on the web.

It has a negative side to it too. Since Facebook assists withholding with individuals worldwide, it breaks the subjugation with loved ones who are directly adjacent to you. It additionally offers various games to play on the web. You can invest your energy in different games on the off chance that you get exhausted with the commonplace looking over and visiting on Facebook.

The most mainstream informal communication stage, Facebook, was made by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Innovation has improved so you can contact individuals living in an alternate country with only a single tick. Facebook permits people to keep in contact with their companions and friends and family with its high-level highlights. A steady web can do ponders. You can transfer your mind-sets, your feelings, even some appropriately harsh criticism, just with the guide of Facebook. It isn’t just a stage to pull off your fatigue; many utilize this stage as a revenue type by selling their items on the web.

It has a negative side to it too. Since Facebook assists withholding with individuals worldwide, it breaks the subjugation with loved ones who are directly next to you. It likewise offers various games to play on the web. You can invest your energy in different games on the off chance that you get exhausted with the ordinary-looking over and talking on Facebook.

10 Lines on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media Essay

• Mark Zuckerberg needed to name the site Facemash at first.
• Ladies use Facebook more than men.
• 80% of Americans use Facebook.
• Mark Zuckerberg’s concept of making Facebook came when he was at Harvard.
• At first, Facebook was not that set up a stage.
• After Google and Youtube, it is the third most well-known site in the realm of person-to-person communication.
• Shockingly, it is stylish in provincial regions.
• Fifty billion individuals are everyday dynamic clients of Facebook.
• This stage adds 50,000 new clients every day.
• 80% of guardians are associated with their kids on Facebook.

FAQ’s on Mark Zuckerberg The Founder Facebook Media Essay

Question 1. What is Facebook?

Answer: The most well-known person-to-person communication stage, Facebook, was made by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Innovation has upgraded so you can contact individuals living in an alternate country with only a single tick. Facebook permits people to keep in contact with their companions and friends and family with its high-level highlights. A steady web can do ponders. You can transfer your temperaments, your feelings, even some appropriately harsh criticism, just with the guide of Facebook.

Question 2. Who is Mark Zuckerberg?

Answer: Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American media head honcho, web business visionary, and donor. He is known for establishing Facebook, Inc. what’s more, fills in as its administrator, CEO, and controlling investor.

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A Short History of Mark Zuckerberg

A Short Biography

On May 14th, 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was born in a small White Plains town, in New York. He was the fourth child of Karen Kempner and Edward Zuckerberg, who already had three girls. This was how it all began… Currently, Mark is only 32, and his net worth by the year 2019 was estimated at $64 billion. But the fact that he is one of the youngest billionaires is the less interesting one. The cool stuff here is actually his startup story, telling how a kid became the founder and later the CEO of one of the most influential websites on Earth. Below is the amazing story of this young entrepreneur and his creation – Facebook Inc.

Mark began writing software and using computers when he was in middle school. His coding experience began with learning Atari basic programming, with the help of his father Edward Zuckerberg, who initially introduced the computer language to the young boy when he was just 6. Mark was learning so fast, that later daddy needed to hire a professional developer to tutor him. David Newman was the man, who was given the task to mentor the young Mark. It was a tough task for the teacher because the student was developing his skills so quickly, that Newman experienced serious difficulties to stay ahead of him. At high school Mark excelled in his classes he won prizes in astronomy, physics, and mathematics. While he was still in high school, he took a college graduate program in computer programming. He built a program called Zucknet where the computer at home could communicate with his father’s computer at his dental practice. He also used his creativity to build computer games often out of ideas his friends would draw for him. Under the name ‘Intelligent Media group’ Mark created a smart music player called “Synapse Media Player” that utilized machine learning to remember and then guess the user’s listening habits and preferences.

When he eventually went to go to college, he claimed to be able to read and write in Latin, French, Hebrew, English, and Greek. His overall knowledge and intelligence helped him excel at college, where he would often recite poems such as the epic ‘The Iliad’.

Mark Zuckerberg at his computer, source: https://harvard.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30054432&id=4&l=ae012

Harvard Years

In college ( Harvard University ) he was already known as a “programming prodigy” due to the work he had done in high school. There he wrote a program he called CourseMatch that helped students make decisions about the courses they wanted to take based upon the choices of others.

At Harvard, the students had books called “Facebooks.” They had the pictures and names of people that lived in the student dorms. Mark build a website that randomly showed two pictures of males and two of females on it. People that visited the site had to choose which person was hotter. This site went up over one weekend and it was called Facemash  (actually this was the first name of Facebook ). It was built ‘just for fun’ but it became so popular, that the college shut it down because of its popularity. First, it caused Harvard’s servers to crash (because of the heavy load it caused) and this caused problems for the students, who wanted to use the Internet for studying. Also, some of them didn’t like the idea of their pictures being used without permission and Zuckerberg was forced to publicly apologize for his actions. Facemash was labeled ‘completely improper’ in the articles that followed in the students’ newspaper.

Here Facebook Comes

In 2004 he began writing a new website which he called TheFacebook , working on  thefacebook.com  domain (the second name of the network). He had several students helping him with TheFacebook including Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz , who are actually the other 4 co-founders of the site. The site was initially just a Harvard site but soon expanded to other colleges and universities. Mark and friends decided to spread the idea and many other universities were included in the network. The social project started gaining momentum really fast and Zuckerberg decided to drop out of college and dedicate his time entirely to the site. He and his team moved to a small house in Palo Alto, which became the office of the young enterprise.

Just a couple of days after TheFacebook was released, the Winklevoss brothers (Cameron and Tyler) and Divya Narendra accused Mark in fraudulent activities and of stealing the Facesmash idea from them while promising the three seniors to help them with the realization of a project called ‘HarvardConnection.com’. This later led to a trial in court in which the Winklevoss brothers won and receive $65 million in compensation (1.2 million Facebook shares).

By 2005 “TheFacebook” was known as just like Facebook. The site opened up to anyone over age 13 in 2006. By 2007 the site had over 100,000 businesses listing their companies on Facebook and creating pages. By 2011 it became the largest digital photograph host and had over 350 million accessing the site over mobile phones.

Facebook IPO

On May 18th, 2012 Facebook made its IPO (initial public offering), offering 421 million shares to private investors at the price of $38. This set the value of the whole company at $104 billion, which made Facebook the biggest business going public till then. Almost everybody wanted to buy a piece of the booming social miracle, so rising almost $16 billion from the market was like a walk in the park. However, things didn’t go well for investors. Just two weeks after the IPO, the market price of the shares fell dramatically by 27% to $27.72 per share. During the next months the price even further, reaching a level of around $ 19. All this didn’t make investors really happy, some of whom lost around 50% of their investments for a few months. More than 40 lawsuits were filed the first week after the IPO. The price has recovered in 2013 and currently, it’s around $41.

10 Interesting Facts About Mark Zuckerberg

1 . Mark Zuckerberg Started Stud ying Programming When He Was Just 12 Years Old Yes , that ‘s right ! A prec ocious Zuckerberg started his career in programming at a young age , building a messaging program for his father ‘s dental office and creating a media player for his father .

2 . He C oded Facebook in His D orm Room Z ucker berg wrote the code for Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 . It quickly became one of the most popular social media platforms of all time , allowing people to connect in ways never before thought possible .

3 . His Fortune is Estimated to be Over $ 65 Billion Mark Zuckerberg ‘s extraordinary success has resulted in an immense fortune . Forbes estimates that he is worth over $ 65 billion which makes it no surprise that he is the fourth richest person in the world .

4 . He ’ s a Giving Phil anthrop ist The tech magn ate is no stranger to charity and has made major donations to organizations such as the American Red Cross and the Centers for Disease Control . He and his wife also donated 99 percent of their Facebook stocks to a charity organization intended to “ ad vance human potential and promote equality . ”

5 . He ’ s Flu ent in Mandarin Growing up in White Plains , New York , Mark Zuckerberg was exposed to the Chinese language , learning Mandarin in high school . He even has a Facebook page dedicated to his Mandarin – speaking fans .

6 . One of His Favorite Films is The Social Network The 2010 film chronic ling Facebook ‘s rise to success was not well received by the tech entrepreneur . Despite this , The Social Network is also one of his favorite films .

7 . His Role Model is Steve Jobs Z ucker berg looks up to the late Apple founder , attribut ing much of his success to Jobs . The Facebook CEO even said that he had a “ great respect for what Steve built . ”

8 . He ‘s Married with two D aughters In 2012 , Zuckerberg tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend Pr isc illa Chan . The couple welcomed their first daughter , Max ima , in 2015 , and their second daughter , August , in 2017 .

9 . He Uses a White board to Stay Organ ized The tech guru often uses a white board to organize his thoughts , projects , and ideas . It ’ s a method to keep him focused and on top of things .

10 . He ‘s a Sleep – Dep rived Work ah olic

Mark Zuckerberg was named to the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world list put out by Time magazine in 2010. Zuckerberg, who is also Jewish, is listed as one of the most influential Jews in the world as well. His net worth is estimated at $42 billion in 2022 and currently, he is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of the social company. There is no doubt that Facebook has changed the way we communicate online and today it remains a very popular site thanks to this young entrepreneur.

Visit Mark Zuckerberg’s official Facebook profile here: https://www.facebook.com/zuck . You can read some more cool stuff about him on Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

The Social Network Movie

If you like movies and at the same time you want to learn many more cool things about Facebook’s story, we strongly recommend watching ‘The Social Network movie. It’s totally dedicated to the foundation of Facebook and explains in a great way many details about the birth of the social site and its early development. You can find more information about it on IMDB:  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/  . It’s an amazing watch for everyone, don’t miss it.

Did you like the story? Please, consider contributing some social love by sharing it with friends! Look at these beautiful social buttons, they’ve been waiting for your touch. Thanks!

Check some other cool startup articles:

Tags: Andrew McCollum Chris Hughes Dustin Moskovitz edited2022 Eduardo Saverin Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship how Facebook Was Started Mark Zuckerberg Mark Zuckerberg Biography Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth Mark Zuckerberg Story The Stories Of Famous Entrepreneurs Welcome to Facebook

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I have a passion for writing about entrepreneurship, innovative business ideas, startups, and other business-related topics. I also enjoy browsing the internet. Combining these interests led to the creation of Businessideaslab.com. Since then, there has been no turning back. The site has become a platform where I can have fun creating engaging stories about the most successful and innovative startups, entrepreneurs, business ideas, and other intriguing topics.

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Read the full transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s commencement address at Harvard

By Nik DeCosta-Klipa

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to the college he once dropped out of to finally receive a (honorary) degree and deliver the commencement address for Harvard’s Class of 2017.

In a humurous and at-times emotional speech, Zuckerberg told the class it was “not enough to have purpose yourself.”

“You have to create a sense of purpose for others,” he said.

Read the full transcript of the speech below, as Zuckerberg posted it on Facebook (of course):

President Faust, Board of Overseers, faculty, alumni, friends, proud parents, members of the ad board, and graduates of the greatest university in the world,

I’m honored to be with you today because, let’s face it, you accomplished something I never could. If I get through this speech, it’ll be the first time I actually finish something at Harvard. Class of 2017, congratulations!

I’m an unlikely speaker, not just because I dropped out, but because we’re technically in the same generation. We walked this yard less than a decade apart, studied the same ideas and slept through the same Ec10 lectures. We may have taken different paths to get here, especially if you came all the way from the Quad, but today I want to share what I’ve learned about our generation and the world we’re building together.

But first, the last couple of days have brought back a lot of good memories.

How many of you remember exactly what you were doing when you got that email telling you that you got into Harvard? I was playing Civilization and I ran downstairs, got my dad, and for some reason, his reaction was to video me opening the email. That could have been a really sad video. I swear getting into Harvard is still the thing my parents are most proud of me for.

What about your first lecture at Harvard? Mine was Computer Science 121 with the incredible Harry Lewis. I was late so I threw on a t-shirt and didn’t realize until afterwards it was inside out and backwards with my tag sticking out the front. I couldn’t figure out why no one would talk to me — except one guy, KX Jin, he just went with it. We ended up doing our problem sets together, and now he runs a big part of Facebook. And that, Class of 2017, is why you should be nice to people.

But my best memory from Harvard was meeting Priscilla. I had just launched this prank website Facemash, and the ad board wanted to “see me”. Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out. My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going away party. As luck would have it, Priscilla was at that party with her friend. We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: “I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly.”

Actually, any of you graduating can use that line.

I didn’t end up getting kicked out — I did that to myself. Priscilla and I started dating. And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t. But without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life, so you could say it was the most important thing I built in my time here.

We’ve all started lifelong friendships here, and some of us even families. That’s why I’m so grateful to this place. Thanks, Harvard.

Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

One of my favorite stories is when John F Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.

You’re graduating at a time when this is especially important. When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.

As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go. I’ve met factory workers who know their old jobs aren’t coming back and are trying to find their place.

To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose.

I remember the night I launched Facebook from my little dorm in Kirkland House. I went to Noch’s with my friend KX. I remember telling him I was excited to connect the Harvard community, but one day someone would connect the whole world.

The thing is, it never even occurred to me that someone might be us. We were just college kids. We didn’t know anything about that. There were all these big technology companies with resources. I just assumed one of them would do it. But this idea was so clear to us — that all people want to connect. So we just kept moving forward, day by day.

I know a lot of you will have your own stories just like this. A change in the world that seems so clear you’re sure someone else will do it. But they won’t. You will.

But it’s not enough to have purpose yourself. You have to create a sense of purpose for others.

I found that out the hard way. You see, my hope was never to build a company, but to make an impact. And as all these people started joining us, I just assumed that’s what they cared about too, so I never explained what I hoped we’d build.

A couple years in, some big companies wanted to buy us. I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to see if we could connect more people. We were building the first News Feed, and I thought if we could just launch this, it could change how we learn about the world.

Nearly everyone else wanted to sell. Without a sense of higher purpose, this was the startup dream come true. It tore our company apart. After one tense argument, an advisor told me if I didn’t agree to sell, I would regret the decision for the rest of my life. Relationships were so frayed that within a year or so every single person on the management team was gone.

That was my hardest time leading Facebook. I believed in what we were doing, but I felt alone. And worse, it was my fault. I wondered if I was just wrong, an imposter, a 22 year-old kid who had no idea how the world worked.

Now, years later, I understand that *is* how things work with no sense of higher purpose. It’s up to us to create it so we can all keep moving forward together.

Today I want to talk about three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world.

First, let’s take on big meaningful projects.

Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together.

Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon – including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects.

These projects didn’t just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things.

Now it’s our turn to do great things. I know, you’re probably thinking: I don’t know how to build a dam, or get a million people involved in anything.

But let me tell you a secret: no one does when they begin. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.

If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook.

Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started. Oh, you know what else movies get wrong about innovation? No one writes math formulas on glass. That’s not a thing.

It’s good to be idealistic. But be prepared to be misunderstood. Anyone working on a big vision will get called crazy, even if you end up right. Anyone working on a complex problem will get blamed for not fully understanding the challenge, even though it’s impossible to know everything upfront. Anyone taking initiative will get criticized for moving too fast, because there’s always someone who wants to slow you down.

In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.

So what are we waiting for? It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place. That makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online, and personalizing education so everyone can learn?

These achievements are within our reach. Let’s do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role. Let’s do big things, not only to create progress, but to create purpose.

So taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose.

Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers. Now we’re all entrepreneurial, whether we’re starting projects or finding or role. And that’s great. Our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress.

Now, an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn’t the first thing I built. I also built games, chat systems, study tools and music players. I’m not alone. JK Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.

But today, we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone. When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose. Right now our society is way over-indexed on rewarding success and we don’t do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots.

Let’s face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Look, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I don’t know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they might not make enough money. But I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.

We all know we don’t succeed just by having a good idea or working hard. We succeed by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.

Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.

We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable childcare to get to work and healthcare that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as technology keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives.

And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.

That’s why Priscilla and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation. It was never a question of if we were going to do this. The only question was when.

Millennials are already one of the most charitable generations in history. In one year, three of four US millennials made a donation and seven out of ten raised money for charity.

But it’s not just about money. You can also give time. I promise you, if you take an hour or two a week — that’s all it takes to give someone a hand, to help them reach their potential.

Maybe you think that’s too much time. I used to. When Priscilla graduated from Harvard she became a teacher, and before she’d do education work with me, she told me I needed to teach a class. I complained: “Well, I’m kind of busy. I’m running this company.” But she insisted, so I taught a middle school program on entrepreneurship at the local Boys and Girls Club.

I taught them lessons on product development and marketing, and they taught me what it’s like feeling targeted for your race and having a family member in prison. I shared stories from my time in school, and they shared their hope of one day going to college too. For five years now, I’ve been having dinner with those kids every month. One of them threw me and Priscilla our first baby shower. And next year they’re going to college. Every one of them. First in their families.

We can all make time to give someone a hand. Let’s give everyone the freedom to pursue their purpose — not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because when more people can turn their dreams into something great, we’re all better for it.

Purpose doesn’t only come from work. The third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community. And when our generation says “everyone”, we mean everyone in the world.

Quick show of hands: how many of you are from another country? Now, how many of you are friends with one of these folks? Now we’re talking. We have grown up connected.

In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn’t nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was “citizen of the world”. That’s a big deal.

Every generation expands the circle of people we consider “one of us”. For us, it now encompasses the entire world.

We understand the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations — to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.

We get that our greatest opportunities are now global — we can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics. Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.

But we live in an unstable time. There are people left behind by globalization across the world. It’s hard to care about people in other places if we don’t feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards.

This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration against those who would slow them down. This is not a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. There are people in every country for global connection and good people against it.

This isn’t going to be decided at the UN either. It’s going to happen at the local level, when enough of us feel a sense of purpose and stability in our own lives that we can open up and start caring about everyone. The best way to do that is to start building local communities right now.

We all get meaning from our communities. Whether our communities are houses or sports teams, churches or music groups, they give us that sense we are part of something bigger, that we are not alone; they give us the strength to expand our horizons.

That’s why it’s so striking that for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find purpose somewhere else.

But I know we can rebuild our communities and start new ones because many of you already are.

I met Agnes Igoye, who’s graduating today. Where are you, Agnes? She spent her childhood navigating conflict zones in Uganda, and now she trains thousands of law enforcement officers to keep communities safe.

I met Kayla Oakley and Niha Jain, graduating today, too. Stand up. Kayla and Niha started a non-profit that connects people suffering from illnesses with people in their communities willing to help.

I met David Razu Aznar, graduating from the Kennedy School today. David, stand up. He’s a former city councilor who successfully led the battle to make Mexico City the first Latin American city to pass marriage equality — even before San Francisco.

This is my story too. A student in a dorm room, connecting one community at a time, and keeping at it until one day we connect the whole world.

Change starts local. Even global changes start small — with people like us. In our generation, the struggle of whether we connect more, whether we achieve our biggest opportunities, comes down to this — your ability to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose.

Class of 2017, you are graduating into a world that needs purpose. It’s up to you to create it.

Now, you may be thinking: can I really do this?

Remember when I told you about that class I taught at the Boys and Girls Club? One day after class I was talking to them about college, and one of my top students raised his hand and said he wasn’t sure he could go because he’s undocumented. He didn’t know if they’d let him in.

Last year I took him out to breakfast for his birthday. I wanted to get him a present, so I asked him and he started talking about students he saw struggling and said “You know, I’d really just like a book on social justice.”

I was blown away. Here’s a young guy who has every reason to be cynical. He didn’t know if the country he calls home — the only one he’s known — would deny him his dream of going to college. But he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t even thinking of himself. He has a greater sense of purpose, and he’s going to bring people along with him.

It says something about our current situation that I can’t even say his name because I don’t want to put him at risk. But if a high school senior who doesn’t know what the future holds can do his part to move the world forward, then we owe it to the world to do our part too.

Before you walk out those gates one last time, as we sit in front of Memorial Church, I am reminded of a prayer, Mi Shebeirach, that I say whenever I face a challenge, that I sing to my daughter thinking about her future when I tuck her into bed. It goes:

“May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us, help us *find the courage* to make our lives a blessing.”

I hope you find the courage to make your life a blessing.

Congratulations, Class of ’17! Good luck out there.

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