Mark Zuckerberg
Co-founder and CEO of Meta (Facebook)
Born 1984
Photo: Anthony Quintano from Westminster, United States · CC BY 2.0
«The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.»
Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook as a Harvard student and turned it into Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, used by more than three billion people. At 23 he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire.
Key achievements
- Founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room, 2004
- Leads Meta, used by more than three billion people
Universities
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Studied psychology and computer science from 2002; launched Thefacebook from his Kirkland House room in February 2004 and left that year.
Facts
- In October 2003 he built Facemash, a site that let students rate classmates' photos; it overloaded Harvard's network within hours and he narrowly avoided expulsion.
- Thefacebook went live on 4 February 2004; within a month more than half of Harvard's undergraduates had joined, and the site spread to Columbia, Stanford and Yale.
- He moved to Palo Alto in the summer of 2004 and never returned to finish his degree; in 2017 Harvard gave him an honorary doctorate and invited him to deliver the commencement address.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.