Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of tech giant Meta, has grown from a Harvard dropout into a billionaire philanthropist with several tech ventures over the years.
The Facebook founder celebrates his 39th birthday on May 14. Zuckerberg is one of the leaders of the tech revolution and continues to inspire people across the globe.
On his birthday, here’s a look at Mark Zuckerberg’s memorable journey.
Born on May 14, 1984, to a dentist father and a psychiatrist mother, Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry located just outside New York.
He started coding at the young age of 11, with a deep interest in AOL and Microsoft.
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Zuckerberg went to high school at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, where he captained his fencing team, before getting an opportunity to study at Harvard University.
At Harvard, Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook.com, from his dorm room on February 4, 2004 with some of his mates.
He dropped out of Harvard in May 2004 as he headed to Silicon Valley, where he received his first major funding of $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, followed by nearly $13 million the next year from Accel Partners.
Facebook had 1 million users by the end of 2004 and it grew to 5.5 million users by 2005.
After rejecting a $ 1 billion buyout from Yahoo, in 2007, Facebook officially launched its revolutionary Facebook Ads platform.
However, ever since its conception, the social media platform was plagued with controversy.
After an elaborate controversy involving the law in 2008, a $65 million settlement was reached with three Harvard classmates, twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra over allegations that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea of the social media platform from them.
Facebook, despite facing backlash and recurring privacy complaints, became one the largest social media networks in the world with a current active user base of 2.98 billion as per Statista.
In 2021, Zuckerberg announced an entire overhaul of his companies which were rebranded under the umbrella of ‘Meta’.
Meta was launched with the aim to bring together the different apps and technologies of the company under one new brand.
Further, the ‘Metaverse’ was launched with a focus to help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses in a virtual world. The Metaverse is essentially a digital space that melds virtual reality, augmented reality with the physical realm.
In 2023, Facebook in 2023 hit the gigantic milestone of garnering over 2 billion daily active users on the platform.
Over the 20 years, Zuckerberg has been at the helm of acquiring companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR and several more.
With a net worth of $87.5 billion (as per Bloomberg), Zuckerberg along with his wife Priscilla Chan, has committed to give away 99 percent of his wealth.
