Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg started a website in his university room at nineteen. More than twenty years later he still runs it, still controls it, and has used it to buy most of its would-be rivals. Few founders have kept such a tight grip on a company so large for so long.

Dobbs Ferry

He was born on 14 May 1984 in White Plains, New York, and grew up in nearby Dobbs Ferry. His father, Edward, was a dentist who ran his practice from the family home. His mother, Karen, was a psychiatrist. He has three sisters.

He began programming as a child. His father hired a tutor for him, and as a teenager he wrote a messaging program, which the family called ZuckNet, that linked the computers in the house to the dental surgery. At Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, he studied classics and fenced, and with a friend built a music player called Synapse that learned what its users liked. Companies including Microsoft and AOL showed interest in it. He turned them down and went to Harvard.

Facemash and TheFacebook

At Harvard he studied psychology and computer science. In October 2003 he built Facemash, a site that put photos of students side by side and asked visitors to pick the more attractive one. He had taken the photos from the university’s online directories without permission. The site was shut down within days, and he was called before a disciplinary board.

A few months later he launched something that asked permission. TheFacebook went live on 4 February 2004 as a directory for Harvard students, who created their own profiles. Within a month about half of the university’s undergraduates had signed up. His co-founders were his fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes.

The site spread to Stanford, Columbia and Yale, and then to hundreds of universities. Three other Harvard students, the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their partner Divya Narendra, said he had taken their idea after agreeing to work for them. The dispute was settled in 2008 for a sum reported at about $65 million in cash and shares.

Palo Alto

In the summer of 2004 he and a few friends rented a house in Palo Alto, California, to work on the site. They never went back. The investor Peter Thiel put in $500,000, the first outside money. In 2005 the company dropped “The” from its name, and the venture capital firm Accel invested $12.7 million.

The early years were chaotic. Saverin, who had put in the first money and handled the business side, fell out with the others, and his stake was cut sharply. He sued, and that dispute too was settled. The story later became the film The Social Network, which Zuckerberg has said got many things wrong, including his motives.

The Offer He Refused

In 2006 Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for about $1 billion. The site had around ten million users and very little revenue. His board and many of his employees wanted him to accept. He said no.

He has since described it as the hardest decision of his early career. Much of his management team left within a year or so. But the decision defined the company, and it established something that has been true ever since: Facebook would be run by its founder, on his judgment, whatever others thought.

The same year he launched the News Feed, which showed users a running stream of what their friends were doing. Users protested at first. Within weeks the feature had become the centre of the site, and the model for almost every social app that followed. Facebook opened to anyone over thirteen in September 2006. In 2007 Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 per cent stake.

Buying the Future

Facebook went public on 18 May 2012, raising $16 billion at a value of more than $100 billion. The shares fell for months afterwards, as investors worried that the company could not make money on mobile phones. It could. Within two years most of its advertising revenue came from mobile.

His most important decisions in those years were acquisitions. In April 2012 he bought Instagram, a photo app with thirteen employees, for $1 billion. In 2014 he bought the messaging app WhatsApp for about $19 billion, and the virtual-reality company Oculus for about $2 billion. Critics called the prices absurd. Instagram and WhatsApp each grew to more than two billion users.

The acquisitions later brought an antitrust case. The US Federal Trade Commission argued that he had bought Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralise competitors. In November 2025 a federal judge ruled in Meta’s favour, finding that the government had not proved that the company held an illegal monopoly.

Cambridge Analytica

In March 2018 newspapers revealed that the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had obtained data from as many as 87 million Facebook users, through a personality quiz app. The data had been collected under the platform’s looser rules of a few years earlier.

In April 2018 he testified before the US Congress for two days. In 2019 the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion over its privacy practices, the largest penalty of its kind at the time. The company also faced criticism over the spread of false information, its role in elections and the effect of its apps on teenagers. He apologised often, and changed the company more slowly than his critics wanted.

Meta

On 28 October 2021 he renamed the company Meta Platforms. The new name signalled a bet on the “metaverse”, shared virtual worlds reached through headsets and glasses. The division building it, Reality Labs, went on to lose tens of billions of dollars.

When the company’s shares fell sharply in 2022, he changed course. He called 2023 the “year of efficiency”, cut about 21,000 jobs, and turned the company towards artificial intelligence. Meta released its Llama models openly, so that others could use and adapt them, and launched Threads, a rival to X, in July 2023.

In 2025 he went further. Meta invested about $14 billion in the data company Scale AI, brought in its founder Alexandr Wang, and set up Meta Superintelligence Labs, recruiting AI researchers with pay packages reported to run into hundreds of millions of dollars. In August 2026 he published a long essay, The Future is for Everyone, arguing that the goal should be “personal superintelligence” available to everyone rather than controlled by a few companies.

Control

The thread through all of it is control. Meta has two classes of shares, and his carry ten votes each. Although he owns a minority of the company’s economic value, he controls the majority of its votes. No board and no group of shareholders can remove him.

He married Priscilla Chan, whom he met at Harvard, in May 2012, the day after the stock market listing. She is a paediatrician. They have three daughters. In December 2015 they announced that they would give away 99 per cent of their Facebook shares during their lifetimes, through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which focuses on science and medicine.

In 2017 he returned to Harvard to receive an honorary degree and give the commencement address, twelve years after leaving without one. He used it to argue that his generation needed to create a sense of purpose for everyone, not just for itself.

The measure of him is the refusal in 2006. Almost everyone around him thought a billion dollars was a fair price for a student website. He thought it was the beginning of something much bigger, and he kept the power to find out. Whether that power has been used well is the argument that has followed him ever since.

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