Mark Zuckerberg is an American entrepreneur, computer programmer, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, a social media and networking platform that launched in February 2004 and has amassed more than 3 billion users—that’s nearly half the world’s population.
In October 2021, Facebook was rebranded as Meta Platforms Inc. (META) -) in a move the company described as its “next chapter.” Its goal was to bring the 3D digital reality known as the metaverse to life in order to “help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.”
With a market capitalization of $479 billion, Meta is one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world, counting 94 internet technology and virtual reality businesses under its umbrella including Instagram, the Threads app, and WhatsApp. Meta has embraced the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies and uses AI to display content to its users. Zuckerberg himself has personally invested millions into AI by becoming one of the largest shareholders of OpenAI, the company behind the conversational chatbot, ChatGPT.
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth?
As of late September 2023, Forbes estimated Zuckerberg’s net worth at about $64.4 billion, making him the 16th-richest person in the world as of this article’s last update.
But Zuckerberg is more than an internet mogul; he’s made a name for himself through offline ventures with his wife, Priscilla, by pledging to give away 99% of their wealth in their lifetimes. He is also an influential millennial celebrity whose life inspired an Oscar-winning movie, "The Social Network."
Zuckerberg has met with government leaders championing increased access to the internet yet also testified before the U.S. Congress on user privacy issues. He has admitted that Facebook shared data on millions of its users with Cambridge Analytica prior to the 2016 Presidential election.
His fans have glimpsed his competitive nature through his long-held rivalry with Elon Musk, another tech giant, often trading jabs on their respective social platforms. Their rivalry has escalated to the point of a proposed cage fight and made headlines around the world.
How did Mark Zuckerberg make his money?
Facebook was not the first social media platform—a computerized bulletin board in Chicago existed as far back as 1978. It wasn’t the first social networking site, either: that distinction goes to Six Degrees, which was founded in 1996. But what Facebook did that was light years ahead of its competitors—what made it truly revolutionary—was that its business was constantly innovating and evolving to meet its users' needs while embracing its staggering growth.
This contrasted with other platforms of the early 2000s, which relied on more traditional, MBA-style strategies like forecasting and planning, effectively stifling innovation. (Remember MySpace, anyone?)
Zuckerberg was a visionary in that way, listening to what his audience wanted and building applications customized to their needs, minting profits all the way. He changed Facebook’s membership model from a private, university-only model at its launch in 2004 to being public-inclusive by September 2006. He also introduced Facebook Marketplace in 2007, which allowed users to sell products and services.
Facebook welcomed businesses to the site that same year by launching Pages; its Application Developer integrated the platform with other sites that year, too. In 2008, Facebook rolled out Chat, its instant messaging service. Farmville launched in June 2009 and had over 10 million users by the end of the summer alone.
Perhaps Facebook’s business model was so transformative because Zuckerberg himself wasn’t only a computer programmer. His major at Harvard was actually psychology, which makes sense when you consider how his platform doesn’t simply connect people together; rather, it allows them a glimpse inside other’s personal lives and relationship statuses, and then it nurtures those relationships every time someone likes, comments, or shares a photo.
Most of Zuckerberg’s wealth came from Facebook, or “TheFacebook,” as it was originally known. Zuckerberg created it at Harvard with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum, and Dustin Moskovitz. It was the follow-up to another program called FaceMash, which displayed side-by-side pictures of students and allowed the user to select which one was more attractive.
Before that, while attending the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg created Synapse, which used AI to learn the musical tastes of its listeners and offer recommendations, attracting the attention of Microsoft and AOL.
But none of these earlier ventures received as much capital as Facebook. PayPal’s Peter Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in the company in June 2004; by 2005, Facebook had generated an additional $13 million from venture capitalists (it also shed “the” from its name that year).
By 2006, Facebook was worth $525 million, and in 2007, Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in the company, adding another $240 million infusion. By the time Facebook went public on May 18, 2012, the company was worth $104 billion, making it one of the largest IPOs in history.
At what age did Zuckerberg become a billionaire?
Zuckerberg was only 23 years old at the time of Facebook’s IPO in 2012, making him the youngest billionaire to date.
Who is Mark Zuckerberg’s wife?
Mark Zuckerberg met his wife, Priscilla Chan, at Harvard. She graduated with a B.S. in Biology in 2007 and went on to obtain an M.D. in pediatrics from the University of California, San Francisco in 2012. They married the day after Facebook’s IPO, on May 19, 2012, and have three daughters together: Maxima, August, and Aurelia.
After the birth of Maxima in 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg published an open letter to their daughter on Facebook, pledging to donate 99% of their Facebook shares (worth $45 billion) to a new charity they had launched called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It provides unrestricted funding to health, education, and technology-related ventures, including funding a $600 million bio hub in San Francisco focused on infectious diseases and a $250 million medical research facility in Chicago that will study how healthy and diseased tissues function.
In addition to raising their daughters, Chan has been actively managing the day-to-day affairs of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She has traveled extensively with Zuckerberg on “listening tours” across America in order to learn more about how people live, work, and “think about the future.”
Why did Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth decline?
Self-described as his “Year of Efficiency,” 2022 was a tough year for Zuckerberg. After its 2021 rebrand, Meta posted its first-ever decline in users in February 2022, sending shares plummeting 20%. Meta lost $230 billion of its market value, and as a result, Meta eliminated more than 21,000 jobs through 2022 and into 2023. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also laid off 48 of its total 450 workers.
However, blue skies are seemingly ahead. Meta’s Q1 2023 earnings soundly beat analysts' expectations, and Q2 results were also strong. It successfully launched Threads in July 2023 to compete against Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly known as Twitter), and Meta’s stock price nearly tripled from January to September of 2023, mainly due to its renewed focus on AI.
Get exclusive access to portfolio managers and their proven investing strategies with Real Money Pro. Get started now.
