Zuckerberg, Mark Elliot
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, 1984–, American computer programmer and business executive, b. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. A computer prodigy as a child, he entered Harvard in 2002 and two years later co-founded Thefacebook.com, a website designed to enable Harvard students to communicate with one another; it soon was extended to other colleges and became extremely popular. Zuckerberg left Harvard and, with two fellow programmers, moved to Palo Alto, Calif., where they set up a social-networking site renamed (2005) Facebook. By 2012, about 800 million people actively used Facebook, and the company, which was tightly controlled by Zuckerberg, had an estimated yearly profit (2011) of $1 billion.
See B. Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaire and D. Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (both: 2010).