Mark Zuckerberg was named one of The World's Most Influential People of 2008 by Time Magazine. Zuckerberg is 25 years old. He, along with some fellow computer science majors at Harvard, created Facebook. Zuckerberg is the CEO and President of Facebook and today has a net worth of more than $1 billion.
Mark was raised in New York by his parents, Edward and Karen. In his middle school years he started programming computers. He enjoyed developing computer programs, communication tools and games. While attending Phillips Exeter Academy, he built a version of the game Risk, a program to help the employees in his father's dental office communicate and a music player named Synapse. It was at this point that Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Mark to their companies. He decided to go to Harvard University instead.
In 2004, Zuckerberg launched Facebook which was an idea from his days at Phillips Exeter Adademy. Facebook started as a "Harvard only" project but before long Zuckerberg decided to spread Facebook to other schools. He used the help of his roommate, Dustin Moskovitz and soon facebook had spread to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale. By time summer arrived, Facebook had released to 45 schools and hundreds of thousands of people.
Zuckerberg and his Harvard friends moved to Palo Alto, California that summer. The students had planned to return to Harvard in the fall, but decided to remain in California. In May, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform to create social applications with Facebook. Within a few weeks, there were millions of Facebook users. Today there are more than 400,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platforms.
In October, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp for $240 million after which Google made a competing offer. In 2008, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg as the 121st richest person in the United States with a net worth of $1.5 billion. Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest person to appear on the Forbes 400 list.
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