Founder of Facebook Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard. He is a billionaire due to his 24% share of Facebook.[2]Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Zuckerberg's parents are Jewish,[3] but he considers himself an atheist.[4] He started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter Academy beginning in his junior year of high school, he went to school at Ardsley High School.[5]

He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy where he immersed himself in Latin.[6] He also built a program to help the workers in his father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk, and under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player named the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot[7] and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.[8] Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard College instead, which he attended in September 2002, and where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity.[9] In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.[6]

Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a hacker"[10] and says hacking isn't about "breaking and entering," it's about "being unafraid to break things in order to make them better."[11] Facebook conducts "hackathons" every six to eight weeks in which participants have one night to conceive of and complete a project.[10] The company provides music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attend.[11] "The idea is that you can build something really good in a night,” Zuckerberg told Wired. "And that’s part of the personality of Facebook now ... It’s definitely very core to my personality."[10]

On Zuckerberg's Facebook page, he lists his personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism." [12]

Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckberberg no. 1 on its list of the Top 100 “most influential people of the Information Age” for 2010.[13] Zuckerberg ranked no. 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009.[14]