page_title: Mark Zuckerberg
section_title: College years
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Zuckerberg / Software developer / College years
caption_attribution_description: Mark Zuckerberg in 2005.
context_page_description: Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder. He also is a co-founder of the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough Starshot and serves as one of its board members.
  Born in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched the Facebook social networking service from his dormitory room on February 4, 2004, with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Originally launched to select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. As of August 6, 2020, according to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg’s net worth passes $100 billion and he is listed by Forbes as the 4th-richest person in the world.
context_section_description: The New Yorker noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy." He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos. According to Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, "he built the site for fun." Hasit explains:
  We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking.
  The site went up over a weekend, but by Monday morning, the college shut it down, because its popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard's network switches and prevented students from accessing the Internet. In addition, many students complained that their photos were being used without permission. Zuckerberg apologized publicly, and the student paper ran articles stating that his site was "completely improper."
  The following semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook," originally located at thefacebook.com.
  Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to The Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation in response.
  Following the official launch of the Facebook social media platform, the three filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg that resulted in a settlement. The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares.
  Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year in order to complete his project. In January 2014, he recalled:
  I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after—I opened up the first version of Facebook at the time I thought, "You know, someone needs to build a service like this for the world." But I just never thought that we'd be the ones to help do it. And I think a lot of what it comes down to is we just cared more.
  On May 25, 2017, at Harvard’s 366th commencement Day, Zuckerberg, after giving a commencement speech, received an honorary degree from Harvard.
caption: Zuckerberg in 2005
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "120", "Image YResolution": "120", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "399", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "341"}