Table of ContentsChildhood BiographyFaceMash – A Fun Site for VotingThe Rise of FacebookFacebook LogoLawsuits Against FacebookBill Gates and FacebookHow Facebook Makes MoneyAcquisition of Instagram, Oculus Rift and WhatsAppIn this success story, we are going to share Mark Zuckerberg biography, the youngest billionaire on the planet who created the social network Facebook which today has 1 billion monthly active users. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay Thanks to Facebook, people around the world can easily stay in touch with all their friends. Not long ago, society did not have such an opportunity, but now everything has changed. Childhood Biography Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 and grew up in the New York suburb of Dobbs Ferry. He was the second of four children and the only son in an educated family. Mark's father, Edward Zuckerberg, is a dentist and his mother, Karen Zuckerberg, is a psychiatrist. His father owned a dental practice next to the family home. Mark became interested in programming in elementary school. The fact that the world is divided between programmers and users, Mark discovered at the age of 10 and bought his first PC Quantex 486DX on Intel 486. In the biography of Mark Zuckerberg, we found out that his father had taught Atari BASIC programming. and when Mark was about 12 years old, he used Atari BASIC to create a messenger, which he called "ZuckNet". It made all computers connected to each other and allowed messages to be transferred between the home and the dental office. His father installed email on his computer in his dentist's office, and the receptionist could notify him when a new patient arrived. Mark also loved developing games and communication tools and, as he said, he just did it for fun. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, even hired a computer tutor, David Newman, who tutored his son. Also in high school, Mark wrote an artificially intelligent media player, Synapse, for MP3 playlists, which carefully studied a user's preferences and was able to generate "guessing" playlists, the songs a user wanted to listen. Microsoft and AOL had unusual interest in the Synapse media player and wanted to acquire it. However, the young talents rejected the IT giants' offer and then politely rejected their invitation to cooperate. This is how Mark Zuckerberg refused to spend tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and work in one of the largest IT companies. Soon, Mark Zuckerberg studied at Phillips Academy in Exeter, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he obtained good results in science and literature, obtaining a diploma in classics. He also showed great talent in fencing and even became captain of the school's fencing team. However, Mark Zuckerberg remained fascinated by coding and wanted to work on developing new software. In 2002, after graduating from Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg entered Harvard University. By his second year at the Ivy League, he had established a reputation as a software developer on campus. That's when he wrote a program CourseMatch, which helps students choose their subjects based on course listings from other users. FaceMash – A fun site for voting In 2003, one summer evening, when Mark Zuckerberg was suffering from insomnia in the Harvard dormitory, he had the idea of ​​creating a site called FaceMash. Mark decided to hack theHarvard database, where students uploaded their profile photos. He quickly wrote a program that randomly selected two photos of two random female students and placed them next to each other, asking "Who is sexier?", thus giving the opportunity to vote. The process was in full swing and the site was visited by most Internet users. Harvard students. When the number of visitors exceeded the limit, the server would crash due to overload. Mark appeared before the committee on computer hacking. Of course, no one told Mark Zuckerberg “Well done!” and he received disciplinary action and noticed that there is a lot of interest in this kind of thing in society. Moreover, Harvard has so far refused to comment on the incident. The rise of Facebook About ten months before Zuckerberg's epic FaceMash, one of the Harvard students – Divya Narendra – had already talked about the idea of ​​creating a social network exclusively for Harvard students, many of whom suffered from emotional stiffness. And to avoid involving "aliens" in the network, Narendra suggested using the Harvard email address as the primary username. Divya Narendra's partners were twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The father of the Winklevoss twins, Howard Winklevoss, is a successful financial consultant and has invested a lot of effort and money in his sons – so the problem of initial capital for the future network could be solved easily. In a conversation with Mark, Narendra said that the project would be called Harvard Connection (later renamed ConnectU) and its members would post their photos, personal information and useful links on the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg's tasks included programming the site and creating special source code, which would allow the system to work as quickly as possible. After a private meeting with Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg agreed to join the work, but he viewed the potential of his new partners with skepticism. While working on Harvard Connection, he had a fantastic idea for his own social network. On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg registered the domain name TheFacebook.com, now known worldwide as Facebook.com. However, this only worked within Harvard. After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were already 4,000 registered users on Facebook, they came to the conclusion that they needed the services of new programmers. One of them was Mark's neighbor, Darren Moskowitz, who opened the Facebook service to students at Columbia University, Stanford and Yale. Around the same time after the IPO, Zuckerberg owned 503.6 million shares. And now Zuckerberg controls almost 60% of the company's votes, with 35% going to Eduardo Saverin and 5% to newcomer Moskowitz. Another friend of Mark's, Chris Hughes, was named Facebook's press secretary. Some time later, registration was opened to all students. The main condition was the availability of an email address in the .edu zone, which also indicated a person's belonging to the education sector. It must be said that at first, this tactic worked rather well. The project attracted public attention with sufficient quality. When a user tried to register, they had to fill out a detailed profile, and in addition to the email address in the .edu zone, they were asked to add an actual profile photo. If people used avatars instead of real photos, their profiles were deleted. Soon, Facebook overtook the education sector and became more and more popular. Mark Zuckerberg startedsearch for investors. The first investments Mark received from one of the founders of PayPal, Peter Thiel, well known throughout Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel allocated $500,000, and this amount was enough for Facebook's immediate needs. The project began to evolve quickly. Less than a year after its creation, more than a million people have joined the social network. To continue growing Facebook, they needed more investment. Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, then Greylock Partners added $27.5 million to that amount. In 2005, Facebook became available to all educational institutions and universities in the United States. Zuckerberg still believed his project was a social network for students, but user interest in Facebook grew exponentially. It was then decided to make an inscription accessible to the public. And after that, an "epidemic" on Facebook began.Facebook logoThe main thingWhat immediately attracted Facebook users was that friends who meet in real life can now communicate with each other online. It was something new. Facebook's audience grew rapidly, but the monetization of the project was still unclear. Everyone expected that the main instrument would be contextual advertising. The fact is that each Facebook user fills out a sufficiently detailed profile, which can be used to display relevant advertisements. Obviously, this would open up enough options for advertisers to interest their audience. But Facebook continued to grow its audience. When they passed 50 million users, big companies started offering to sell the project to Zuckerberg. So once even Yahoo! offered $900 million for Facebook. An impressive sum, but one that didn't satisfy Mark at all. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook biography and success story is quite intriguing, isn't it? Lawsuits against Facebook The launch of the Facebook project was accompanied by a series of scandals. Six days later, after the site launched, student brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea. They claimed that in 2003, Zuckerberg was hired to help him complete the creation of the social network HarvardConnection.com. According to their testimonies, Zuckerberg did not provide them with the results of his work but used the original source code to create Facebook. The same year, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins launched their own network renamed ConnectU. And they continued to attack Mark Zuckerberg, complaining about the Harvard administration and the Harvard Crimson newspaper. At first, Zuckerberg urged journalists not to publish the investigation: he showed them what he supposedly did for HarvardConnection and explained that these developments had nothing to do with Facebook. But very inappropriately, another Harvard student – ​​John Thomson – began saying in personal conversations that Zuckerberg had stolen one of his ideas for Facebook. The newspaper decided to publish the article, which greatly offended Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg took revenge on the Harvard Crimson. According to Silicon Alley Insider, in 2004, he hacked the mailboxes of two Harvard Crimson journalists, using the new Facebook. It found users involved in the log and looked through their logs (i.e. history) of mistyped passwords on Facebook. Zuckerberg's expectations were met: two newspaper employees absent-mindedly tried to log into Facebook with their mailbox passwords. Silicon Alley Insiderwrites that Zuckerberg was lucky: he had the chance to read the correspondence about him between the editorial staff and HarvardConnection. The Winklevoss twins and Narendra filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, but the court rejected their claim. They persisted and filed another complaint. This time, the court examined the sources of the codes to understand whether they were actually stolen. But the truth was still unclear. The results of the exam have not been announced. In 2009, Zuckerberg agreed to pay $45 million ($20 million in cash and the remaining amount in Facebook stock) to ConnectU as part of the legal settlement. The case was closed. At that time ConnectU had less than 100,000 users, Facebook had around 150 million users. The Winklevoss twins have not yet calmed down and filed a petition with the United States Court of Appeals, but they were denied a new trial. According to their lawyer Jerome Falk, the appeals court refused to reexamine the case based solely on the parties' settlement agreement, which states that participants in the trial after signing the document do not have the right to resume the trial. In the lawyer's opinion, the decision was illegal, because Mark Zuckerberg, during proceedings in 2008, provided false information about the company's value. On May 17, 2011, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss filed another lawsuit against Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg in the United States Supreme Court. It was the brothers' latest attempt to get the court to reexamine the case. Bill Gates and FacebookIn 2007, an important event happened on Facebook. Microsoft acquired a 1.6% stake in Facebook for an impressive $240 million. Based on this, several analysts have estimated that Facebook's total value is as high as $15 billion. Quite good results for the company, whose revenues do not exceed $200 million per year. After the deal, Bill Gates created an account on Facebook. He used to spend several hours a day communicating via Facebook with everyone, but after a while he decided to close his account for a while because too many people were willing to chat with him. Physically, he wasn't able to talk to each of them. However, Gates led a major public relations campaign for Facebook around the world. This is especially important for Microsoft, given that it had an exclusive advertising deal with the social network until 2011. How Facebook Makes Money In 2013, Facebook, Inc.'s revenue reached 7, 87 billion dollars and its net profit – 1.5 billion dollars. The growth rates are also impressive: in three years, turnover has increased sixfold. Facebook's core revenue comes from contextual advertising on the social network's pages. The growing number of users and the time they spend on the site are converted into advertising revenue. 85% of the cash flow that flowed through the company last year was earned through contextual advertising. Most of the remaining 15% are deductions from purchases made through the Facebook payment system. Most of these are not real but virtual goods. For example seeds, fruits and vegetables purchased by fans of the popular game Farmville developed by Zynga. FarmVille – a popular Facebook game developed by Zynga. Despite their apparent frivolity, virtual goods are serious business, and Facebook's report confirms it. The company estimates that in 2010, the turnover of the global virtual goods market reached $7 billion and that in.