Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, CEO & President of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. As a Harvard student, he created the online social website Facebook, a site popular among American college students, with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. He serves as Facebook's CEO. He has been the subject of controversy for the origins of his business and his wealth.

Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World's Most Influential People of 2008. Zuckerberg fell under the Scientists & Thinkers category for his web phenomenon, Facebook, and ranked 52 out of 101 people. The list consisted of international revolutionaries that honors people from Barack Obama and Dalai Lama to Michael Phelps and Brangelina.

Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, NY, and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, by his parents, Edward and Karen Zuckerberg, who are both doctors. His father Edward is a dentist in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed making computer programs, especially communication tools and games. He started programming when he was in middle school. While attending Phillips Exeter Academy in high school, he built a program to help the workers in his dad's office communicate and a version of the game Risk. He also built a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but instead he decided to attend Harvard University.

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. It quickly became a success at Harvard and more than two-thirds of the school's students signed up in the first two weeks. Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Northwestern, UCLA, Harvard, the University of Virginia (UVA) and Yale and then to other Ivy League colleges and schools in the Boston area, including Tufts University, Boston University and Boston College. By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty-five schools and hundreds of thousands of people were using it.

Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in California. To date, he has not returned as a student to the college. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto a few months later. Today, the company has seven buildings and several hundred people in downtown Palo Alto, forming what Zuckerberg calls an "urban campus".

Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, claim he stole their idea for their own site, ConnectU. A lawsuit was filed in 2004 and has been dismissed without prejudice on March 28, 2007, but was never ruled on. It was refiled soon thereafter in U.S. District Court in Boston, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 25, 2007. At the hearing the judge told ConnectU parts of their complaint were not sufficiently pled and gave them the ability to refile an amended complaint. On June 25, 2008, the case was settled and Facebook agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of cash and stock.

As part of the lawsuit, in November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of Harvard alumni magazine 02138. They included Zuckerberg's social security number, his parents' home address and his girlfriend's address. Facebook filed to get the documents taken down, but the judge ruled in favor of 02138.

Forbes Top400 ranked Mark as #321 richest person in the world with $1.5 billion networth. He is also the youngest person to ever appear on the Forbes list.

On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc. This would indicate that Facebook had a market value of $15 billion at the time of the sale. However, most analysts believe the actual valuation of to be far less. The $240 million dollars paid by Microsoft includes premiums for both preferred shares and global ad placements.