Mark Zuckerberg is a Harvard freshman with a flair for computer programming. Less than a decade later, he was the baby-faced billionaire power broker who brushed shoulders with the president. He turned a dorm project into the largest global village on the Internet. The site now has more than 900 million users. Yet despite all these achievements, Zuckerberg still faces bitter battles and lawsuits over Facebook’s origins. It waged an all-out war against its arch-rival.
Zuckerberg has come under fire for pushing the boundaries of user privacy. He’s not just dealing with a technology, he’s dealing with people and their behavior, and in many ways he’s doing it spontaneously. They have huge databases of information about us, and because we trust them, the question is should we still trust them? We think we know Mark because we see his life in the Oscar-winning film The Social Network. The portraits are relentless. A super geek, passionate, straightforward, brilliant, and socially weak. But is it accurate?
From the beginning, Mark’s mission has been to connect people, and this is clearly based on the theory that the world would be a better place if it was more connected. But when you really dig into Facebook’s history, there are plenty of surprises. The biggest surprise was Mark Zuckerberg’s eccentric and stubborn personality, as well as his unwavering conviction.
Born in 1984, he grew up in Dobbs Ferry-on-Hudson, a residential development north of New York City. David Kirkpatrick spent two years researching a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook called The Facebook Effect. He comes from a very supportive family, he is an only son and has three sisters. This is a person who has no confidence issues.
Zuckerberg grew up computer-savvy, teaching him the complex computer language C++ and creating a digital version of the board game Risk in ninth grade. He actually created something called Zucknet, an internal instant messaging system for homes that would allow computers to talk to each other. He is that kind of kid. When he got a little tired of the local high school, he decided to attend Exeter Prep School because he just wanted more of a challenge. At Exeter College, Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D’Angelo created a music website called Synapse.
