Entrepreneur Profile: Mark Zuckerberg

This is a new of  a monthly special for us here at the Money Lion. Every month we are going to do a profile on a famous entrepreneur and their rise to business success. This month we are looking at Mark Zuckerberg following his floatation of Facebook on the public stock market.

Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in Dobbs Ferry, New York to a well educated family, his father a dentist and his mother a psychiatrist.

Whizz Kid

From an early age, Mark showed a strong interest in computing and programming. When he was 12 he created a simple messaging program, Zucknet, to allow his father to contact his receptionist about incoming patients.

In order to nuture Mark’s interest in computers, the family hired a private tutor to teach him from home. the tutor apparently later said that it was difficult to keep ahead of Mark as he had started taking courses at a nearby college.

The University Years

Then in 2002 he started at Harvard on a psychology and computer science course. In 2003 Zuckerberg created the infamous Facemash where Harvard students were encouraged to rate their fellow students based on their looks. It was swiftly taken down by the university  administration.

Following the success of his previous projects, he was approached by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss twins to create the Harvard Connection. Zuckerberg agreed to work on the project but then moved onto work on his own site and The Facebook was launched in 2004. By the end of 2007, Facebook has 1 million users.

Controversy and Soaring Success

In 2009 Zuckerberg faced his first challenge as head of his new company, the Winklevoss twins started a legal battle against him stating he stole their idea. The dispute continued right into 2015 even though an initial settlement fee of $65 million was agreed.

Then in 2013 Zuckerberg’s story was made into a film entitled “The Social Network”, but Mark had mixed thoughts on the film saying:

“So there’s all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right.”

Finally on the 18th of May, Zuckerberg floated Facebook on the open stock market where it was valued at $104bn.

Mark was named Person of the year 2013 by Time magazine and beat Steve Jobs to no. 35 on Forbes 400 list with an estimated net worth at around $6.9 billion.
With his sizable fortune, and lack of bad debts, Mark gives to a variety of philanthropic causes such as signing the “Giving Pledge”, stating he would donate at least 50% of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other members of this pledge include George Lucas and Bill Gates.

At only 28, this is just the beginning for Mark Zuckerberg with a rumoured Facebook phone looking to be released next year, we imagine there is still much to come from this young entrepreneur.

What do you think has contributed to Zuckerberg’s success? What do you think the future holds for the Facebook empire? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

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