Mark Zuckerberg is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.
In February 2004, when Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, and Zuckerberg were all students at Harvard University, they founded Facebook. The service was first started on a few college campuses, but it quickly gained popularity and subsequently extended outside of institutions, reaching one billion members by 2012. In May 2012, Zuckerberg sold the bulk of his shares in the firm to the public. He achieved the status of the youngest self-made millionaire in the world in 2007 at the age of 23.
Since 2008, Time magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg among the 100 most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award, which he was recognized in 2010. Zuckerberg was listed as the tenth most powerful person in the world by Forbes in December 2016. He was rated 11th with a net worth of $57.7 billion on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans in 2022, down from his position as the third-richest American in 2021 with a net worth of $134.5 billion.
According to Forbes Real Time Billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg had a net worth of $33.5 billion as of November 2022, ranking him as the 29th richest person in the world.
i2hub
In February 2004, a month after Zuckerberg debuted Facebook, Wayne Chang introduced i2hub, another campus-exclusive service. On peer-to-peer file sharing, i2hub concentrated. At the time, Facebook and i2hub were both attracting media attention, accumulating a lot of users, and becoming widely known. A forerunner to the Facebook Platform apps that debuted in 2007 was the Wirehog peer-to-peer file-sharing service, which was established in August 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D’Angelo, and Sean Parker.
Internet.org
In 2013, Zuckerberg introduced Internet.org, which he defined as a project to give the five billion people who lacked access to it as of the debut date, Internet access. The initiative ran into a major controversy in India, where campaigners said the constrained internet violated the idea of net neutrality. In response, Zuckerberg argued that a constrained internet was preferable to none. Although Zuckerberg later met with Narendra Modi to explore potential alternatives, Internet.org was shut down in India in February 2016. Breakthrough Starshot, a startup he co-founded in 2016, is developing solar-sail spacecraft, and Zuckerberg serves on its board of directors.
Philanthropy & Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Start-up Education foundation was created by Zuckerberg. On September 22, 2010, it was revealed that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had given $100 million to Newark Public Schools, the city’s public school system. The contribution was made just before the publication of The Social Network, which offered a fairly unfavorable picture of Zuckerberg, according to critics. The issue was addressed by Zuckerberg, who stated, “The thing that I was most careful about with the movies schedule was, I didn’t want the news about The Social Network movie to get confused with the Newark project. Just to keep the two things apart, I considered doing this under an assumed name. “Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, and Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, said that they had to persuade Zuckerberg’s staff not to contribute anonymously. According to writer Dale Russakoff, the money was mostly squandered.
In 2010, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg all signed “The Giving Pledge,” pledging to give at least half of their fortune to charity over the course of a lifetime and encouraging other affluent people to do the same. By The Giving Pledge, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged in December 2012 that they would devote the bulk of their money to “advancing human potential and supporting equality” throughout the course of their lives.
According to Facebook’s value at the time, on December 19, 2013, Zuckerberg announced a donation of 18 million Facebook shares worth $990 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which was to be carried out by the end of the month. The donation was acknowledged as the biggest philanthropic gift ever recorded for 2013 on December 31. With a $1 billion donation to charity, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife were ranked first on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of the 50 most charitable Americans for 2013. To fight the Ebola virus sickness, notably the West African Ebola virus outbreak, Zuckerberg and Chan contributed US$25 million in October 2014.
