Happy Birthday Mark Zuckerberg! It has been a long journey for you from setting up codes to building an amazing social ecosystem around peer-liking and photo-sharing, widely known as Facebook, today. We appreciate your passion to make weird, commonplace.
Today, the creator of the world’s largest-ever social network turns 37 and by this phase of life, he has achieved almost everything that most of the entrepreneurs and leaders cherish and aspire the most. Roping in three out of every five internet users worldwide on a single platform was next to impossible – until a few years back. And by minting millions from a free-to-use platform Mark Zuckerberg has superseded many renowned personalities in the industry. Just to give you a comparison, at the age of 30 Microsoft founder Bill Gates was busy in developing the first retail version of Windows OS and Steve Jobs was busy with market feedbacks that came to him post the launch of Macintosh computers. Needless to say, none of these had made his billion by the age of 30 years.
Born: Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, May 14, 1984
Net Worth: $109.2 billion (As of May 2021)
The most commendable of Mark’s traits seem the knack of hacking ideas for the love of it. Be it FaceMash.com – the first ever website created by Mark – where people voted for the Hottest Face in school or Synapse that could analyse music listening habits and recommend new songs. Interestingly, the domain name FaceMash.com was sold for $30,301 in 2010.
The industrious Mark, he did not even spare the chance of learning Chinese to communicate with Priscilla’s parents. Priscilla who? You must be joking! She is Mark Zuckerberg’s wife for whom he took some heat for giving her a ruby wedding ring worth $25,000. Did I mention Mark was valued worth $19 billion at that time? Oops, sorry then!
Smart, of course. Come September 2006, Mark wriggled out of the accusation of encouraging cyberstalking just because he introduced News Feed by sneaking in some privacy options thus defending his belief in free information flow.
Besides, here is a little bonus, though already available on the Internet, most people are still not aware of these:
- On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook (originally thefacebook.com) from his Harvard dormitory room, along with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Later they expanded this social-media app to Stanford, Columbia and Yale.
- On December 1, 2004, Facebook’s number of active users reached 1 million mark.
- Though he draws $1 as salary from Facebook, his personal net worth stands at $109.2 billion, as of May 2021.
- In 2016, Mark topped the list of Americas Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 by Forbes, with $50 billion of net worth.
- To all Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg haters take it as a challenge; Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile is the only profile on Facebook that can’t be blocked. Don’t believe us, try it yourself.
- Mark Zuckerberg was available on its arch competitive networks Twitter (@FINKD) and Google+ with a sizable number of followers. Interestingly, in 2011, he leapfrogged Google’s Co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin by number of Followers on Google+.
- Mark Zuckerberg’s daughter Maxima (Max) was born on December 2, 2015. To celebrate her birthday, Zuckerberg pledged to give away 99% of his Facebook shares – valued at $45 billion – to charity and formed a new organisation called Chan Zuckerberg.
- Mark Zuckerberg was ranked #5 on the list of Forbes’ Billionaires 2021, aka the Richest People in the World in 2021.
We wish Mark’s passion, courage, smartness and industriousness inspire a lot more people to think different, break records (like he surpassed having more Facebook users that India’s population) and become successful.
The post is a part of a B’day series where we celebrate the birthday of a renowned personality from Tech Industry, regularly. The intend is to highlight the person’s achievements and touch base the little known, but interesting, part of his life. To make it more exciting, we suggest you make use of the comment section if you are among the ones celebrating their birthday with today’s featured personality.
