The youngest billionaire on the planet with 4 billion dollars in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, creator and CEO of the social network Facebook, ranks 52nd among the richest men in the Forbes 2011 ranking. His personal fortune is estimated at 13. 5 billion dollars in 2011.
A 2003 graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Mark Zuckerberg naturally joined Harvard. Passionate about computers and gifted in programming, he created his first network intended to note the sex appeal of his classmates by hacking photos on Harvard servers. At the beginning, the Internet user has two portraits of girls in front of his eyes and he votes for the sexiest girl at Harvard. The success was dazzling: 22,000 connections in less than two hours.
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg officially launched Facebook, a social network intended first for Harvard students and then for other universities, with immediate success. Little by little, Mark adds features that make it easy to find acquaintances, communicate with them and see mutual friends at a glance.
It was only in 2006 that the Facebook network was open to the public. The craze for the network is growing, stealing the spotlight from Myspace, even though it is published by the giant Yahoo.
Mark Zuckerberg is initially banking on behavioral targeting advertising, which consists of allowing advertisers to directly target customers supposedly interested in their offers. But faced with the outcry raised by those who see it as a violation of the right to privacy, he is forced to review his copy. In 2010, 500 million people on the planet had a Facebook account.
Credibility was acquired by Facebook when in 2007, Microsoft put on the table the 280 million dollars which allowed it to hold 1.7% of the most dynamic social network of the moment. Since then, investors have been flocking there, including Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing, who spent $120 million in two years to acquire some 0.8% of Facebook.
In 2010, Facebook had 500 million members and reached an annual turnover of $500 million in 2009. It is the 5th most visited site in the world. In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg topped the ranking of the 100 most powerful media personalities published by the British daily The Guardian, ahead of Rupert Murdoch, Larry Page and Steve Jobs.
Mark Zuckerberg still suffered two lawsuits, one against the Winklevoss twins who accused him of intellectual property infringement and one against Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of The Facebook (the first version of Facebook) who was his roommate at Harvard but also his best friend. Note that the latter was credited following a financial arrangement.
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