Mark Zuckerberg
| |
|---|---|
Zuckerberg in April 2018
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| Born |
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
May 14, 1984
White Plains, New York, U.S.
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| Residence | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Years active | 2004–present |
| Known for | Co-founding and leading Facebook |
| Home town | Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S. |
| Salary | One-dollar salary |
| Net worth |  $66.6 billion (February 2019) |
| Spouse(s) |
Priscilla Chan (m. 2012)
|
| Children | 2 |
| Relatives |
|
| Website | facebook |
| Signature | |
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Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (/ˈzʌkərbɜːrɡ/; born May 14, 1984) is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding and leading Facebook as its chairman and chief executive officer.
Born in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook from his dormitory room on February 4, 2004, with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Originally launched to select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. His net worth is estimated to be $55.0 billion as of November 30, 2018, declining over the last year with Facebook stock as a whole. In 2007 at age 23 he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. As of 2018, he is the only person under 50 in the Forbes ten richest people list, and the only one under 40 in the Top 20 Billionaires list.
Since 2010, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award. In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked 10th on Forbes list of The World's Most Powerful People.
Early life
Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York. His parents are Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a small Westchester County village about 21 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. Zuckerberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household, with ancestors hailing from Germany, Austria and Poland. He had a Star Wars themed Bar Mitzvah when he turned 13 and once "questioned things" before deciding "religion is very important".At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, where he won prizes in science (mathematics, astronomy, and physics) and classical studies. In his youth, he also attended the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer camp. On his college application, Zuckerberg stated that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team.
Software developer
Early years
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. In one program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet" that allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.According to writer Jose Antonio Vargas, "some kids played computer games. Mark created them." Zuckerberg himself recalls this period: "I had a bunch of friends who were artists. They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." Vargas notes that Zuckerberg was not, however, a typical "geek-klutz", as he later became captain of his prep school fencing team and earned a classics diploma. Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff", recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.
During Zuckerberg's high school years, he worked under the company name Intelligent Media Group to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.
College years
Zuckerberg in 2005
Vargas noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy". He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. In his sophomore
year, 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. 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. According to Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, "he
built the site for fun". Hasit explains:
We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking.
The site went up over a weekend, but by Monday morning, the college
shut it down, because its popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard's network switches
and prevented students from accessing the Internet. In addition, many
students complained that their photos were being used without
permission. Zuckerberg apologized publicly, and the student paper ran
articles stating that his site was "completely improper."
The following semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to The Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation in response.
Following the official launch of the Facebook social media
platform, the three filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg that resulted in a
settlement. The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year in order to complete his project. In January 2014, he recalled:
I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after—I opened up the first version of Facebook at the time I thought, "You know, someone needs to build a service like this for the world." But I just never thought that we'd be the ones to help do it. And I think a lot of what it comes down to is we just cared more.
On May 28, 2017, Zuckerberg received an honorary degree from Harvard.
Career
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy,
the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published
its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book", which students
referred to as "The Facebook". Such photo directories were an important
part of the student social experience at many private schools. With
them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years,
their friends, and their telephone numbers.
Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a
"Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools,
enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia University, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale. Samyr Laine, a triple jumper representing Haiti at the 2012 Summer Olympics,
shared a room with Zuckerberg during Facebook's founding. "Mark was
clearly on to great things," said Laine, who was Facebook's fourteenth
user.
Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and some friends moved to Palo Alto, California in Silicon Valley where they leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel,
who invested in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004.
According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard, but
eventually decided to remain in California.
They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy the
company. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning:
"It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the
most important thing is that we create an open information flow for
people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me."
He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open." Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing strategies for Facebook. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark. When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained:
I guess we could ... If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... That's the simplest thing we could do. But we aren't like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.
In 2010, Steven Levy, who wrote the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a hacker". Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better". Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project.
The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many
Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended.
"The idea is that you can build something really good in a night",
Zuckerberg told Levy. "And that's part of the personality of Facebook
now ... It's definitely very core to my personality."
Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age". Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009. In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman's annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.
In a 2011 interview with PBS shortly after the death of Steve Jobs,
Zuckerberg said that Jobs had advised him on how to create a management
team at Facebook that was "focused on building as high quality and good
things as you are".
Zuckerberg and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during their meeting at the Russian leader's residence outside Moscow, October 1, 2012
On October 1, 2012, Zuckerberg visited Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook's position in the Russian market.
Russia's communications minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev urged the social media giant's founder to abandon plans to lure
away Russian programmers and instead consider opening a research center
in Moscow. In 2012, Facebook had roughly 9 million users in Russia,
while domestic clone VK had around 34 million.
Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook's head of consumer marketing, claimed that
85 million American Facebook users were exposed to the first day of the
Home promotional campaign on April 6, 2013.
On August 19, 2013, The Washington Post reported that Zuckerberg's Facebook profile was hacked by an unemployed web developer.
At the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt
conference, held in September, Zuckerberg stated that he is working
towards registering the 5 billion humans who were not connected to the
Internet as of the conference on Facebook. Zuckerberg then explained
that this is intertwined with the aim of the Internet.org project,
whereby Facebook, with the support of other technology companies, seeks
to increase the number of people connected to the internet.
Zuckerberg was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona,
Spain, in March 2014, which was attended by 75,000 delegates. Various
media sources highlighted the connection between Facebook's focus on
mobile technology and Zuckerberg's speech, claiming that mobile
represents the future of the company. Zuckerberg's speech expands upon the goal that he raised at the TechCrunch conference in September 2013, whereby he is working towards expanding Internet coverage into developing countries.
Alongside other American technology figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, Zuckerberg hosted visiting Chinese politician Lu Wei,
known as the "Internet czar" for his influence in the enforcement of
China's online policy, at Facebook's headquarters on December 8, 2014.
The meeting occurred after Zuckerberg participated in a Q&A session
at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2014, where he
attempted to converse in Mandarin Chinese;
although Facebook is banned in China, Zuckerberg is highly regarded
among the people and was at the university to help fuel the nation's
burgeoning entrepreneur sector.
Zuckerberg fielded questions during a live Q&A session at the
company's headquarters in Menlo Park on December 11, 2014. The founder
and CEO explained that he does not believe Facebook is a waste of time,
because it facilitates social engagement, and participating in a public
session was so that he could "learn how to better serve the community".
Zuckerberg receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. In June 2016, Business Insider named Zuckerberg one of the "Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" along with Elon Musk and Sal Khan, due to the fact that he and his wife "pledged to give away 99% of their wealth — which is estimated at $55.0 billion."
Wirehog
A month after Zuckerberg launched Facebook in February 2004, i2hub, another campus-only service, created by Wayne Chang, was launched. i2hub focused on peer-to-peer
file sharing. At the time, both i2hub and Facebook were gaining the
attention of the press and growing rapidly in users and publicity. In
August 2004, Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D'Angelo, and Sean Parker launched a competing peer-to-peer file sharing service called Wirehog, a precursor to Facebook Platform applications.
Platform, Beacon, and Connect
Zuckerberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (January 2009).
On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Platform,
a development platform for programmers to create social applications
within Facebook. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some
already had millions of users. It grew to more than 800,000 developers
around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.
On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced Beacon, a social
advertising system that enabled people to share information with their
Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites. For
example, eBay
sellers could let friends know automatically what they have for sale
via the Facebook news feed as they listed items for sale. The program
came under scrutiny because of privacy concerns from groups and
individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the
concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg wrote a blog post
on Facebook, taking responsibility for the concerns about Beacon and offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.
In 2007, Zuckerberg was added to MIT Technology Review's TR35 list as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform for users.
Internet.org
In a public Facebook post, Zuckerberg launched the Internet.org
project in late August 2013. He explained that the primary aim of the
initiative is to provide Internet access to the five billion people who
are not connected as of the launch date. Using a three-tier strategy,
Internet.org will also create new jobs and open up new markets,
according to Zuckerberg. He stated in his post:
The world economy is going through a massive transition right now. The knowledge economy is the future. By bringing everyone online, we'll not only improve billions of lives, but we'll also improve our own as we benefit from the ideas and productivity they contribute to the world. Giving everyone the opportunity to connect is the foundation for enabling the knowledge economy. It is not the only thing we need to do, but it's a fundamental and necessary step.
To stay proven on the efforts of bringing in the concept of net neutrality, Zuckerberg met Narendra Modi, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai at Silicon Valley, to discuss on how to effectively establish affordable internet access to the less developed countries. As a token of initiation, he changed his Facebook profile picture to extend his support to the Digital India to help the rural communities to stay connected to the internet.
Legal controversies
ConnectU lawsuits
Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra
accused Zuckerberg of intentionally making them believe he would help
them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU). They filed a lawsuit in 2004, but it was dismissed on a technicality on March 28, 2007. It was refiled soon thereafter in federal court in Boston. Facebook countersued in regards to Social Butterfly, a project put out by The Winklevoss Chang Group, an alleged partnership between ConnectU and i2hub. On June 25, 2008, the case settled and Facebook agreed to transfer over 1.2 million common shares and pay $20 million in cash.
In November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of 02138,
a magazine that catered to Harvard alumni. They included Zuckerberg's
Social Security number, his parents' home address, and his girlfriend's
address. Facebook filed to have the documents removed, but the judge
ruled in favor of 02138.
Saverin lawsuit
A lawsuit filed by Eduardo Saverin
against Facebook and Zuckerberg was settled out of court. Though terms
of the settlement were sealed, the company affirmed Saverin's title as
co-founder of Facebook. Saverin signed a non-disclosure contract after
the settlement.
Pakistan criminal investigation
In June 2010, Pakistani Deputy Attorney General Muhammad Azhar Sidiqque launched a criminal investigation into Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes after a "Draw Muhammad"
contest was hosted on Facebook. The investigation named the anonymous
German woman who created the contest. Sidiqque asked the country's
police to contact Interpol to have Zuckerberg and the three others arrested for blasphemy.
On May 19, 2010, Facebook's website was temporarily blocked in Pakistan
until Facebook removed the contest from its website at the end of May.
Sidiqque also asked its UN representative to raise the issue with the United Nations General Assembly.
Paul Ceglia
In June 2010, Paul Ceglia, the owner of a wood pellet fuel company in Allegany County, upstate New York,
filed suit against Zuckerberg, claiming 84 percent ownership of
Facebook and seeking monetary damages. According to Ceglia, he and
Zuckerberg signed a contract on April 28, 2003, that an initial fee of
$1,000 entitled Ceglia to 50% of the website's revenue, as well as an
additional 1% interest in the business per day after January 1, 2004,
until website completion. Zuckerberg was developing other projects at
the time, among which was Facemash, the predecessor of Facebook, but did not register the domain name thefacebook.com
until January 1, 2004. Facebook management dismissed the lawsuit as
"completely frivolous". Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told a reporter
that Ceglia's counsel had unsuccessfully sought an out-of-court
settlement.
On October 26, 2012, federal authorities arrested Ceglia,
charging him with mail and wire fraud and of "tampering with, destroying
and fabricating evidence in a scheme to defraud the Facebook founder of
billions of dollars." Ceglia is accused of fabricating emails to make
it appear that he and Zuckerberg discussed details about an early
version of Facebook, although after examining their emails,
investigators found there was no mention of Facebook in them. Some law firms withdrew from the case before it was initiated and others after Ceglia's arrest.
Palestinian terror attacks
On July 2, 2016, Israeli cabinet minister Gilad Erdan accused Zuckerberg of having some responsibility for deadly attacks by Palestinians against Israelis. According to him, the social network was not doing enough to ban posts to its platform that incite violence against Israelis. "Some of the victims' blood is on Zuckerberg's hands", Erdan said.
Hawaiian land ownership
In January 2017, Zuckerberg filed eight "quiet title and partition" lawsuits against hundreds of native Hawaiians to purchase small tracts of land which they own. This land is contained within the 700 acres of land in the Hawaiian island of Kauai that Zuckerberg had purchased in 2014. When he learned that Hawaiian land ownership law differs from that of the other 49 states, he dropped the lawsuits.
Testimony before U.S. Congress
On April 10 and April 11, 2018, Zuckerberg began testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding the usage of personal data by Facebook in relation to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data breach. He has called the whole affair a breach of trust between Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. Zuckerberg has refused requests to appear to give evidence on the matter to a Parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom.
Depictions in media
The Social Network
A movie based on Zuckerberg and the founding years of Facebook, The Social Network was released on October 1, 2010, starring Jesse Eisenberg
as Zuckerberg. After Zuckerberg was told about the film, he responded,
"I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive."
Also, after the film's script was leaked on the Internet and it was
apparent that the film would not portray Zuckerberg in a wholly positive
light, he stated that he wanted to establish himself as a "good guy". The film is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which the book's publicist once described as "big juicy fun" rather than "reportage". The film's screenwriter Aaron Sorkin told New York magazine,
"I don't want my fidelity to be the truth; I want it to be
storytelling", adding, "What is the big deal about accuracy purely for
accuracy's sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?"
Upon winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture on January 16, 2011, producer Scott Rudin thanked Facebook and Zuckerberg "for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other." Sorkin, who won for Best Screenplay, retracted some of the impressions given in his script:
- I wanted to say to Mark Zuckerberg tonight, if you're watching, Rooney Mara's character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie. She was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist.
On January 29, 2011, Zuckerberg made a surprise guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, which was being hosted by Jesse Eisenberg. They both said it was the first time they ever met.
Eisenberg asked Zuckerberg, who had been critical of his portrayal by
the film, what he thought of the movie. Zuckerberg replied, "It was
interesting."
In a subsequent interview about their meeting, Eisenberg explains that
he was "nervous to meet him, because I had spent now, a year and a half
thinking about him ..." He adds, "Mark has been so gracious about
something that's really so uncomfortable ... The fact that he would do SNL
and make fun of the situation is so sweet and so generous. It's the
best possible way to handle something that, I think, could otherwise be
very uncomfortable."
Disputed accuracy
Jeff Jarvis, author of the book Public Parts, interviewed
Zuckerberg and believes Sorkin made up too much of the story. He states,
"That's what the internet is accused of doing, making stuff up, not
caring about the facts."
According to David Kirkpatrick, former technology editor at Fortune magazine and author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, (2011),
"the film is only "40% true ... he is not snide and sarcastic in a
cruel way, the way Zuckerberg is played in the movie." He says that "a
lot of the factual incidents are accurate, but many are distorted and
the overall impression is false", and concludes that primarily "his
motivations were to try and come up with a new way to share information
on the Internet".
Although the film portrays Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook in
order to elevate his stature after not getting into any of the elite final clubs at Harvard, Zuckerberg said he had no interest in joining the clubs.
Kirkpatrick agrees that the impression implied by the film is "false".
Karel Baloun, a former senior engineer at Facebook, notes that the
"image of Zuckerberg as a socially inept nerd is overstated ... It is
fiction ..." He likewise dismisses the film's assertion that he "would
deliberately betray a friend".
Other depictions
Graffiti depicting Zuckerberg on the Israeli West Bank barrier in Bethlehem, July 2018
Zuckerberg voiced himself on an episode of The Simpsons titled "Loan-a Lisa", which first aired on October 3, 2010. In the episode, Lisa Simpson
and her friend Nelson encounter Zuckerberg at an entrepreneurs'
convention. Zuckerberg tells Lisa that she does not need to graduate
from college to be wildly successful, referencing Bill Gates and Richard Branson as examples.
On October 9, 2010, Saturday Night Live lampooned Zuckerberg and Facebook. Andy Samberg played Zuckerberg. The real Zuckerberg was reported to have been amused: "I thought this was funny."
Stephen Colbert awarded a "Medal of Fear" to Zuckerberg at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30, 2010, "because he values his privacy much more than he values yours".
Zuckerberg appears in the climax of the documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply.
Zuckerberg was parodied in the South Park episode "Franchise Prequel".
On December 7, 2018, Epic Rap Battles of History released a rap battle between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Philanthropy
Chan and Zuckerberg in Prague (2013)
Zuckerberg donated an undisclosed amount to Diaspora, an open-source personal Web server that implements a distributed social networking service. He called it a "cool idea".
Zuckerberg founded the Start-up: Education foundation. On September 22, 2010, it was reported that Zuckerberg had donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey. Critics noted the timing of the donation as being close to the release of The Social Network, which painted a somewhat negative portrait of Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg responded to the criticism, saying, "The thing that I was
most sensitive about with the movie timing was, I didn't want the press
about The Social Network movie to get conflated with the Newark
project. I was thinking about doing this anonymously just so that the
two things could be kept separate." Newark Mayor Cory Booker stated that he and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had to convince Zuckerberg's team not to make the donation anonymously. The money was largely wasted, according to journalist Dale Russakoff.
On December 9, 2010, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed "The Giving Pledge",
in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their
wealth over the course of time, and invited others among the wealthy to
donate 50 percent or more of their wealth to charity.
In December 2012, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan
announced that over the course of their lives they would give the
majority of their wealth to "advancing human potential and promoting
equality" in the spirit of The Giving Pledge.
On December 1, 2015, they announced they would eventually give 99
percent of their Facebook shares (worth about US$45 billion at the
time) to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
On December 19, 2013, Zuckerberg announced a donation of 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation,
to be executed by the end of the month—based on Facebook's valuation as
of then, the shares totaled $990 million in value. On December 31,
2013, the donation was recognized as the largest charitable gift on
public record for 2013. The Chronicle of Philanthropy
placed Zuckerberg and his wife at the top of the magazine's annual list
of 50 most generous Americans for 2013, having donated roughly $1
billion to charity.
In October 2014, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated US$25 million to combat the Ebola virus disease, specifically the West African Ebola virus epidemic.
in 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced that it would give
$600 million to Biohub a location in San Francisco's Mission Bay
District near the University of California, San Francisco, to allow for easy interaction and collaboration between scientists at UCSF; University of California, Berkeley; and Stanford University.
On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan announced the birth of
their first daughter Max, and in an open letter to Max, they pledged to
donate 99% of their Facebook shares, then valued at US$45 billion, to
the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,
their new organization that will focus on health and education. The
donation will not be given immediately, but over the course of their
lives. Instead of forming a charitable corporation to donate the value of the stock to, as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and other tech billionaires have done, Zuckerberg and Chan chose to use the structure of a limited liability company. This has drawn criticism from a number of journalists.
On August 28, 2017, Chan and Zuckerberg announced the birth of their second daughter.
Politics
Zuckerberg listening to President Barack Obama before a private meeting where Obama dined with technology business leaders in Woodside, California, February 17, 2011.
In 2002, Zuckerberg registered to vote in Westchester County, New York, where he grew up, but did not cast a ballot until November 2008. Santa Clara County
Registrar of Voters Spokeswoman, Elma Rosas, told Bloomberg that
Zuckerberg is listed as "no preference" on voter rolls, and he voted in
at least two of the past three general elections, in 2008 and 2012.
Zuckerberg has never revealed his own political views: some news outlets consider him to be a conservative, while others consider him liberal.
On February 13, 2013, Zuckerberg hosted his first ever fundraising event for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Zuckerberg's particular interest on this occasion was education reform,
and Christie's education reform work focused on teachers unions and the
expansion of charter schools. Later that year, Zuckerberg hosted a campaign fundraiser for Newark mayor Cory Booker, who was running in the 2013 New Jersey special Senate election. In September 2010, with the support of Governor Chris Christie, Booker obtained a US$100 million pledge from Zuckerberg to Newark Public Schools. In December 2012, Zuckerberg donated 18 million shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a community organization that includes education in its list of grant-making areas.
Zuckerberg with Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, 2015
On April 11, 2013, Zuckerberg led the launch of a 501(c)(4) lobbying group called FWD.us. The founders and contributors to the group were primarily Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, and its president was Joe Green, a close friend of Zuckerberg. The goals of the group include immigration reform, improving the state of education in the United States, and enabling more technological breakthroughs that benefit the public,
yet it has also been criticized for financing ads advocating a variety
of oil and gas development initiatives, including drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge and the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2013, numerous liberal and progressive groups, such as The League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, Democracy for America, CREDO, Daily Kos, 350.org,
and Presente and Progressives United agreed to either pull their
Facebook ad buys or not buy Facebook ads for at least two weeks, in
protest of Zuckerberg ads funded by FWD.us that were in support of oil
drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline, and in opposition to Obamacare among Republican United States senators who back immigration reform.
A media report on June 20, 2013 revealed that Zuckerberg actively
engaged with Facebook users on his own profile page after the online
publication of a FWD.us video. In response to a claim that the FWD.us
organization is "just about tech wanting to hire more people", the
Internet entrepreneur replied: "The bigger problem we're trying to
address is ensuring the 11 million undocumented folks living in this
country now and similar folks in the future are treated fairly."
In June 2013, Zuckerberg joined Facebook employees in a company float as part of the annual San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration.
The company first participated in the event in 2011, with 70 employees,
and this number increased to 700 for the 2013 march. The 2013 pride
celebration was especially significant, as it followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that deemed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional.
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Zuckerberg and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, 2016
When questioned about the mid-2013 PRISM
scandal at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2013,
Zuckerberg stated that the U.S. government "blew it." He further
explained that the government performed poorly in regard to the
protection of the freedoms of its citizens, the economy, and companies.
Zuckerberg placed a statement on his Facebook wall on December 9,
2015 which said that he wants "to add my voice in support of Muslims in
our community and around the world" in response to the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino attack. The statement also said that Muslims are "always welcome" on Facebook, and that his position was a result of the fact that "as a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities."
On February 24, 2016, Zuckerberg sent out a company-wide internal
memo to employees formally rebuking employees who had crossed out
handwritten "Black Lives Matter"
phrases on the company walls and had written "All Lives Matter" in
their place. Facebook allows employees to free-write thoughts and
phrases on company walls. The memo was then leaked by several employees.
As Zuckerberg had previously condemned this practice at previous
company meetings, and other similar requests had been issued by other
leaders at Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote in the memo that he would now
consider this overwriting practice not only disrespectful, but
"malicious as well." According to Zuckerberg's memo, "Black Lives Matter
doesn't mean other lives don't -- it's simply asking that the black
community also achieves the justice they deserve." The memo also noted
that the act of crossing something out in itself, "means silencing
speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's."
Zuckerberg also said in the memo that he would be launching
investigations into the incidents. New York's Daily News
interviewed Facebook employees who commented anonymously that,
"Zuckerberg was genuinely angry about the incident and it really
encouraged staff that Zuckerberg showed a clear understanding of why the
phrase 'Black Lives Matter' must exist, as well as why writing through
it is a form of harassment and erasure."
In January 2017, Zuckerberg criticized Donald Trump's executive order to severely limit immigrants and refugees from some countries.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie criticized Zuckerberg over Facebook’s role in spreading religious intolerance in Sri Lanka. Moulavi Zahran Hashim, a radical Islamist imam believed to be the mastermind behind the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings, preached on a pro-ISIL Facebook account, known as "Al-Ghuraba" media.
Personal life
Zuckerberg met his future wife, fellow student Priscilla Chan, at a fraternity party during his sophomore year at Harvard. They began dating in 2003.
In September 2010, Zuckerberg invited Chan, by then a medical student at the University of California, to move into his rented Palo Alto house. Zuckerberg studied Mandarin in preparation for the couple's visit to China in December 2010.
On May 19, 2012, Zuckerberg and Chan married in Zuckerberg's backyard
in an event that also celebrated her graduation from medical school. On July 31, 2015, Zuckerberg announced that he and Chan were expecting a baby girl. He said he felt confident that the risk of miscarrying was low so far into the pregnancy, after Chan had already suffered three miscarriages. On December 1, Zuckerberg announced the birth of their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg ("Max"). The couple announced on their Chinese New Year video, published on February 6, 2016, that Maxima's official Chinese name is Chen Mingyu (Chinese: 陈明宇). They welcomed their second daughter, August, in August 2017. The Zuckerbergs also have a Komondor named Beast who they adopted before having children. Beast has over 2 million followers on Facebook.
Zuckerberg has also been very active in China, and he has been a member of Tsinghua University business school's advisory board since 2014.
Zuckerberg was raised Jewish but later identified as an atheist, a position he has since renounced. He has shown an appreciation for Buddhism. With regard to Christianity, both Zuckerberg and his wife told Pope Francis
in August 2016 "how much we admire his message of mercy and tenderness,
and how he's found new ways to communicate with people of every faith
around the world." In December 2016, when asked "Aren't you an atheist?" in response to a Christmas Day
post on Facebook, Zuckerberg responded, "No. I was raised Jewish and
then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I
believe religion is very important." As he closed his commencement address at Harvard University in May 2017, Zuckerberg shared the Jewish prayer Mi Shebeirach, which he stated he says when he faces challenges in life.
