Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, in 1984, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. A precocious programmer, at thirteen he wrote a small messaging tool for his father's practice, and as a teenager developed Synapse, an auto-recommending music player that Microsoft and AOL unsuccessfully tried to buy in 2002. Admitted to Harvard in 2002, he stood out for two controversial projects : Facemash in 2003, which compared photographs of female students and was quickly shut down by the administration, and, on 4 February 2004, "thefacebook.com", a social network restricted to Harvard students. Success was immediate ; within weeks the site spread to Columbia, Stanford and Yale, then in 2005 to all American universities, before opening to the general public in September 2006. Zuckerberg left Harvard, moved with his co-founders — Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes — to Palo Alto, and received the first outside investment from Peter Thiel in 2004. Facebook introduced the News Feed in 2006, the Platform API in 2007, the "Like" button in 2009, and acquired Instagram in 2012 for one billion dollars, WhatsApp in 2014 for nineteen billion, and Oculus the same year. The May 2012 IPO valued the company at 104 billion dollars. From 2016 Zuckerberg faced major controversies : foreign electoral interference, the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, repeated Congressional hearings in Washington, and European regulation through the 2018 GDPR and the 2022 Digital Services Act. In October 2021 he renamed the parent company Meta Platforms to embody his bet on the "metaverse" and augmented reality with the Quest headset line, then pivoted from 2023 towards generative artificial intelligence with the open-weights Llama model family. He also co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 to fund science and education. On this site Zuckerberg dominates the Web 2.0 period alongside Larry Page and, through his investments in open AI, joins Geoffrey Hinton and Sam Altman in the generative-AI period.