Mark Zuckerberg

Before Facebook became Meta Platforms, and before its founder became one of the richest people in the world, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was a boy in Dobbs Ferry, New York, writing code. Born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, he was raised with his three sisters in a Reform Jewish household. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, was a dentist, and his mother, Karen, was a psychiatrist. By about eleven, he had created “ZuckNet,” a program that let computers in the family home and his father’s dental office communicate with one another.

Zuckerberg’s talent for programming followed him through school. He first attended Ardsley High School, then transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he captained the fencing team. During high school, he built the Synapse Media Player, a music player that used machine learning to learn a user’s listening habits. It drew attention online and was rated by PC Magazine. He also took a graduate computer course at Mercy College on Thursday evenings. By the time he arrived at Harvard College in 2002, The New Yorker noted that he already had a reputation as a programming prodigy.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg studied psychology and computer science, lived in Kirkland House, and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi. His early campus projects showed an interest in how people connect, compare, and organize themselves. CourseMatch helped students choose classes based on what others were taking and form study groups. Facemash, a later program, let students choose the best-looking person from pairs of photos. Its popularity overwhelmed part of Harvard’s network, and students complained that their photos had been used without permission. Zuckerberg publicly apologized, and the student paper called the site “completely improper.”

In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, he launched “Thefacebook” with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. What began as a Harvard site spread to other schools, including Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale. Zuckerberg left Harvard in his second year to work on the project, and the team moved to Palo Alto, California, where a small leased house became an office. In mid-2004, they got their first office, and Peter Thiel invested in the company.

Facebook grew from a campus network into a defining company of the social media age. Zuckerberg became chairman, CEO, and controlling shareholder of Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company. He took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares, and in 2008, at age 23, became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His rise also brought scrutiny. He faced lawsuits over the creation and ownership of Facebook, as well as issues including user privacy. The 2010 film The Social Network was based on his early career, legal troubles, and initial success with the company.

Zuckerberg has also used his fortune for large donations, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His words often reflect the restless, high-speed world that shaped him: coding early, building quickly, taking criticism, and betting on scale. When he says, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk,” it sounds less like a slogan than a summary of the environment he helped create, where an idea from a college room could become a company watched by the world.