Profile+of+Mark+Zuckerberg

Profile of Mark Zuckerberg By: Matt Kenyon Group 1B

Born on the 14th of May in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg ranks as the youngest billionaire in the world, according to Forbes magazine. At 27-years-old, Zuckerberg is worth an estimated $6.9 billion as a co-founder of Facebook and controls about 25% of the company. After dropping out of Harvard University at the age of 20, Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, to focus his attention on the soon-to-be popular social network and take charge of the design, infrastructure, and technology development that would help make Facebook one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web (Vargas, 2010). Although it is obviously his most successful creation, Zuckerberg worked on several other projects before Facebook, the most notable being Facemash, a website that compared his Harvard co-eds side-by-side and prompted students to choose which one was ‘hot’ and which one was ‘not’. Zuckerberg faced disciplinary action from Harvard for Facemash and was forced to take it down immediately. Facebook was created a mere three months after and Zuckerberg dropped out later that year (Vargas, 2010). After Facebook experienced a high degree of early success, Zuckerberg spent a substantial amount of time battling legal allegations over the next few years. After paying an estimated $65 million to fellow Harvard classmates Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, who accused Zuckerberg of stealing script from their University-based site, Zuckerberg also had to give around 5% of the Facebook stock, along with an undisclosed amount of money, to former friend and partner Eduardo Severin (Thomas, 2007). Zuckerberg exemplifies some of Easterbrook’s most central themes of //Sonic// //Boom// : the higher frequency of instant success and the virtual reality that the Internet is making the world a flatter place. Despite being a college dropout, he was able to create a site with 500 million members worldwide, 70% of which are outside the United States.

References:

Vargas, Jose. (2010, September 20). The face of facebook. The New Yorker, Retrieved from [] Thomas, Owen. (2007, July 20). A brief history of mark zuckerg's legal woes. Retrieved from [] legal-woes Easterbrook, Gregg. (2010). Sonic boom: globalization at mach speed. New York, NY: Random House.