Diploma in General English
E-learning Component
Mark Zuckerberg's Profile: Bloomberg Game Changers
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In 2004, at the age of nineteen, he created Facebook. Today, the twenty-eight-year-old CEO has accumulated a net worth estimated at fifteen point five billion dollars.
'Mark's mission from the beginning was about connecting people and it was clearly based on his theory that if the world were more connected it would be a better place.'
'But there are a lot of surprises when you dig deep into the story of Facebook. The biggest single surprise is the peculiarandtenacious personality of Mark Zuckerberg. And, you know, the depth of his convictions and his consistency.'
Born in 1984, he grew up in the Hudson River town of Dobbs Ferry, a bedroom community north of New York City. David Kirkpatrick spent two years researching a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook called the Facebook Effect.
'He comes from an unbelievably supportive family in which he's the only son, and he has three sisters. So he was kind of the prince, and in fact I think his parents called him 'the prince'. And he was treated accordingly.
So this is a guy without any problem of self-confidence.'
Computer-savvy from the start, Zuckerberg taught himself the complicated computer language C++, and by ninth grade had created a digital version of the board game Risk.
Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas interviewed Zuckerberg for his New Yorker magazine profile.
'He actually created a thing called Zucknet, which is an internal instant messaging system for the family, so the computers could talk to each other. [Laughs] I mean, that's the kind of kid he was.'
'When he got sort of tired of his local school, he decided to go to Exeter Prep School, really because he just wanted more challenge.
It was at the exclusive Exeter Academy, that Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D'Angelo, created a music website called Synapse.
'It was intended toanticipatewhat your preferences might be, and it was very, very popular. Even before he started Facebook, he was fending off offers from Microsoft and others to buy Synapse for well over a million dollars.'
Like a tech world version of an all-star athlete, big-name companies wanted to recruit him right out of Exeter.
Again, Zuckerberg was unimpressed, and chose instead to enter Harvard in 2002, where it wasn't long before he got himself in trouble. Zuckerberg hacked into the school's computers to collect images of students.
Nicholas Carlson is deputy editor at BusinessInsider.com.
‘You sort of can tell that he’s a little bit of a troublemaker. He creates something called Facemash – it’s the first year in Harvard – and it’s sort ofhotor not for the Harvard community. And it maintained an entire list of the Harvard students and which ones were the most attractive, ranking them by hotness.’
Ellen McGirt interviewed Zuckerberg for Fast Company magazine.
‘Facemash worked in kind of a little bit of anicky way. It made people upset. Obviously people felt marked or exposed and it was one of the first big experiences that Mark had with the privacy issues of the masses.’
Under pressure, Zuckerberg shut down the site. The Harvard Administration Board charged him with breaching security, violatingcopyrights and violating individual privacy. But by then, Facemash was a campussensation.
Zuckerberg had seen his future.
‘At the same time as getting into trouble for building this mischievous web tool, he built a mischievous web tool that was really popular.’
‘I image he had a couple ofsleepless nightsimagining how bad this thing was going to be, and was relieved when it all blew over. Um, but was also incredibly curious about what he could then make next.
‘If you’re a genius with genius friend sitting in a dorm room, suddenly the world looks like a big, happy open place if you can just get into that database.’