With a net worth estimated at $74.2 billion as of November 2017, and ranked in 2016 by Forbes as the fifth richest person in the world, Mark Zuckerberg is an inspiration to us all.
He was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York to Karen and Edward Zuckerberg; a Psychiatrist and a Dentist. He was raised Jewish alongside his three sisters. Extremely bright as a child, he began using computers and writing software in middle school and in junior high school won prizes in Math, Astronomy and Physics. In High School, he built a software program he called “ZuckNet” that allowed all the computers between the house and his father’s dental office to communicate with each other. It is considered a “primitive” version of AOL’s Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.
Mark Zucherberg went on to attend the prestigious Harvard College where he studied Psychology and Computer Science. In his sophomore year at Harvard, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. In a short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best looking person from a choice of photos.
This was however shut down by the school authorities then as it was considered to be highly inappropriate.
He later went on to launch Facebook on the 4th of February, 2004 from his dorm room in university. He began by introducing it to his campus and then proceeded to other campuses where it was widely accepted. He later dropped out of college to finish this project.
By 2012, Facebook had reached a billion users worldwide. Mark also had his fair share of legal battles from friends which claimed to have a stake in the company as they had been present in the formative years of Facebook. On May 28th, 2017 he received an honorary degree from Harvard.
Mark is also a philanthropist concerned with advancing human potential and promoting equality. He founded the Chan Zuckerberg foundation. Over the years, he has donated to several causes around the globe from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the West African Ebola Virus Epidemic amongst others.
