INSPIRE YOUR DREAM TO LIFE! Biography of FACEBOOK CEO.
Born on May 14, 1984 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, Mark
Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website Facebook out of his college
dorm room. He left Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site,
the user base of which has grown to more than 250 million people, making
Zuckerberg a billionaire. The birth of Facebook was recently portrayed in the
film
Mark
Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, into a
comfortable, well-educated family. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental
practice attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a
psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children—Mark, Randi, Donna
and Arielle.
Zuckerberg
developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he
used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet."
His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist
could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family
also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends, he
also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who
were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build
a game out of it."
To
keep up with Mark's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private
computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with
Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the
prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this
same time.
Zuckerberg
later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in
New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the
school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.
Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on
developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early
version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several
companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the
software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.