NET WORTH : $112 Billion
American business tycoon, computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984. He is the executive chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder of Meta Platforms (previously Facebook, Inc.), the parent company of the social media platform Facebook, which he co-founded.
While a student at Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, and Dustin Moskovitz. When the website was first introduced, it was limited to a few college campuses. Nevertheless, it grew quickly and finally reached one billion users in 2012. In May 2012, Zuckerberg brought the company's majority shares to the public. At 23 years old, he became the youngest self-made millionaire in history in 2007. Since then, he has organized other charitable projects with the use of his money, such as the founding of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Four times, in 2008, 2011, 2016, and 2019 consecutively, Zuckerberg has been named one of the world's most important people. He has also been nominated as a finalist in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Time magazine awarded him Person of the Year in 2010, the year Facebook surpassed half a billion members. According to Forbes, Zuckerberg was the ninth most powerful person in the world in December 2016. With a personal worth of $106 billion, he was placed eighth on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 2023.
Zuckerberg has drawn political and legal attention due to his notoriety and rapid ascent in the technological sector. When Facebook was first established, Zuckerberg was embroiled in a number of legal battles pertaining to the design and ownership of the website, as well as concerns about user privacy. He was a founding member of the immigration advocacy group FWD.us in 2013. In testimony before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on April 10 and 11, 2018, Zuckerberg discussed Facebook's use of user data in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data leak.
Early Life and Education
On May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born into the family of dentist Edward Zuckerberg and psychiatrist Karen (née Kempner). In Dobbs Ferry, New York, he and his three sisters, Angelelle, Randi, and Donna, grew up in a Reform Jewish home. Jewish immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland were his great-grandparents. Zuckerberg first attended Ardsley High School before moving on to Phillips Exeter Academy for his high school education. He led the fencing squad as captain.
Software Development
In middle school, Zuckerberg started utilizing computers and creating software. He created a software in high school that enabled communication between all the computers in his father's dentistry practice and his own home. Zuckerberg worked on developing the Synapse Media Player, a music player, while still in high school. The gadget was rated a 3 out of 5 by PC Magazine and was posted to Slashdot using machine learning to determine the user's listening preferences. About Zuckerberg, a New Yorker profile stated: "Some children played computer games. They were made by Mark".
College Years
The New Yorker said that Zuckerberg had established a "reputation as a programming prodigy" by the time he enrolled in Harvard in 2002. He was a member of Kirkland House and Alpha Epsilon Pi, and he studied computer science and psychology. He created a tool in his sophomore year called CourseMatch that let users create study groups and make judgments about which classes to enroll in based on the selections of other students. Later, he developed an alternative application that he first named Facemash, which allowed students to choose the most attractive individual from a selection of images. Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, Arie Hasit, clarified:
All of the residents of the student dorms had their names and photographs listed in books we dubbed Face Books. He originally constructed a website on which he posted two images, or images of two men and two women. Users of the website were asked to rate the "hotter" people in order of their votes.
Career
Zuckerberg started coding a new website in January 2004. Together with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg established "Thefacebook" on February 4, 2004, with its initial website being thefacebook.com. Zuckerberg graduated in 2002 from Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school that may have served as an early source of inspiration for Facebook. Students called to it as "The Facebook" and it issued its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book." In many private schools, these picture directories played a significant role in the social life of the students. Students might include characteristics like their buddies, phone numbers, and class years with them.
Companies Owned by Mark Zuckerberg
- Meta
- Threads
- Novi
- CTRL-Labs
META PLATFORMS
Based in Menlo Park, California, Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly known as Facebook, Inc. and TheFacebook, Inc., is an international technological company of American origin. In addition to other goods and services, the business owns and runs Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Among the top ten largest publicly listed firms in the US is Meta, one of the most valuable companies in the world. It is regarded as one of the Big Five American IT businesses, along with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Apple.
Along with Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Oculus (which it integrated into Reality Labs), Meta has also acquired Mapillary, CTRL-Labs, Facebook, Instagram, and a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms. The company has also ventured into non-VR hardware, such as the now-canceled Meta Portal line of smart displays, and it currently partners with Luxottica through the Ray-Ban Stories wearable technology. Even with its forays into hardware, the company's primary source of income remains advertising, which accounted for 97.5 percent of its total revenue in 2022.
The name Facebook, Inc. was changed to Meta Platforms, Inc. on October 28, 2021 by the parent company of Facebook in order to "reflect its focus on building the metaverse". As per Meta, the phrase "metaverse" denotes the cohesive setting that unites all of the enterprise's offerings.
Incorporation Year : 2004
Revenue : $116 Billion
FACEBOOK
The American technological behemoth Meta Platforms owns Facebook, an online social media and social networking platform. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, four other Harvard College students, and their roommates. The name of the company comes from the Facebook directories that are frequently provided to college students in the United States. Initially restricted to Harvard students, membership eventually grew to include students from other North American colleges. With a few exceptions, when the age restriction is 14, Facebook has allowed users to signup as early as 13 years old (or older) since 2006. Facebook claimed to have 3 billion monthly active users as of December 2022, and it was the third most popular website globally.In the 2010s, it was the most downloaded smartphone application.
Devices having Internet connectivity, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones, can access Facebook. Users can establish a profile with personal information about themselves after registration. people have the ability to publish multimedia, text, and photographs that may be shared openly or with other people they have chosen to "friend" or with varying privacy settings. In addition, users may join groups based on shared interests, have direct conversations with one another via Messenger, and get updates on the sites and friends they follow and their friends' actions.
Incorporation Year : 2004
Revenue : $120 Billion
THREADS
Meta Platforms is the operator of the social media and online networking site Threads. With the app, users may upload and share text, photos, and videos in addition to replying, reposting, and like other users' postings. The functioning of Threads is comparable to X (previously known as Twitter), and it is closely associated with the Meta platform Instagram. Users must also have an Instagram account in order to utilize Threads under the same Instagram name. The software may be downloaded on iOS and Android smartphones; a mobile app must first be installed in order to access the online version, which has restricted functionality. It has surpassed ChatGPT's record by accumulating over 100 million members in only five days, making it the fastest-growing consumer software program in history.
Following Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition of Twitter, Meta staff members looked into the idea of giving Instagram text-based capabilities. In December 2022, Instagram Notes—a function that goes by that name—went live. After that, the business started working on a different app that was only for text posts. As "Project 92" internally referred to, development on Threads started in January 2023 and the platform launched on July 5, 2023. Threads went up right away in 100 countries (out of 193 UN members), but it has postponed its launch in the EU as it awaits regulatory clarification on the service's data gathering practices from the European Commission.
Incorporation Year : 2023
User: 33 Millions
WHATSAPP
The freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service WhatsApp (formally known as WhatsApp Messenger) is owned by the American software company Meta Platforms. It enables users to share photos, documents, user locations, and other material in addition to sending text, voice, and video messages and making audio and video conversations. The client application for WhatsApp is available on PCs and is used on mobile devices. To register for the service, you need a cellular phone number. WhatsApp Business is a stand-alone business app that was published in January 2018 that can interface with the regular WhatsApp client.
The program was developed by Mountain View, California-based WhatsApp Inc., which Facebook purchased in February 2014 for about US$19.3 billion. By 2015, it was the most widely used messaging app globally, and by February 2020, there were over 2 billion users. In many areas of the world, including Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, and a sizable portion of Europe and Africa, it has emerged as the main method of Internet communication by 2016.
Incorporation Year : 2009
Revenue : $1 Billion
INSTAGRAM
Instagram is a social networking website that allows users to share photos and videos. It is owned by Meta Platforms. Users are able to submit media files that may be geotagged, altered using filters, and arranged with hashtags. Public or pre-approved followers can view posts. Users may follow other users to add their stuff to a personal feed, view trending content, like images, and browse other users' content by tags and places.
Instagram first set itself apart by limiting content framing to a square (1:1) aspect ratio of 640 pixels, which matched the iPhone's display width at the time. This limitation was loosened in 2015 when the pixel count was increased to 1080. Additionally, it introduced messaging capabilities, the capacity to combine several photos or videos into a single post, and a Stories feature that let users upload material to a chronological feed that was visible to other users for a whole day. The Stories feature was modeled after Snapchat, the company's primary rival. By January 2019, 500 million individuals were using Stories every day.
Incorporation Year : 2010
Revenue : $50 Billion
CTRL-LABS
American computational neuroscientist Thomas Reardon was born in 1969. He is the CEO and co-founder of CTRL-labs.He used to work at Microsoft as a developer and programmer. At its height in the early 2000s, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) was the most widely used web browser in the world. He is credited with starting the effort to develop IE. In 2015, he and Columbia University neuroscientists created CTRL-labs. He is now in charge of Facebook Reality Labs' neural interfaces group after CTRL-labs was acquired.
Incorporation Year : 2017
Revenue : $1 Billion
Quotes by Mark Zuckerberg
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