Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the

world's youngest billionaires.

Who Is Mark Zuckerberg?

Born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website
Facebook out of his college dorm room. He left Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site, the user
base of which has grown to more than 2 billion people, making Zuckerberg a billionaire. The birth of Facebook was
portrayed in the 2010 film The Social Network.

Early Life

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated
family, and raised in the nearby village of Dobbs Ferry. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached
to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children—Mark,
Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create
a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist
could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate
within the house. Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who
were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it."

To keep up with Mark's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to
come to the house once a week and work with Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the
prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he
showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma
in classics. Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on developing new programs.
While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several
companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager
before graduation. He declined the offers.

Time at Harvard

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. By his sophomore year at the ivy
league institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he
built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other
users. He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote
on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school
administration after it was deemed inappropriate.
Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler
Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site
was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite.
Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site with friends
Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.

Zuckerberg and his friends created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate
with other users. The group ran the site—first called The Facebook—out of a dorm room at Harvard until June 2004.
After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook full time, moving the
company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

The Rise of Facebook

In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested
$12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to ivy league students. Zuckerberg's company then
granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5
million users by December 2005. The site then began attracting the interest of other companies, who wanted to advertize
with the popular social hub. Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo!
and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding
more features.

Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up, however in 2006, the business mogul faced his first big hurdle. The
creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to
pay for their business losses. Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social
networks but, after lawyers searched Zuckerberg's records, incriminating Instant Messages revealed that Zuckerberg
may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users' private
information to his friends.

Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. "If you're going to go on to build
a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?" he said in an interview
with The New Yorker. "I think I've grown and learned a lot."

Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter
continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their
stock.

Zuckerberg faced yet another personal challenge when the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, by writer Ben
Mezrich, hit stores. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented scenes,
re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters. Regardless of how true-to-life the story was, Mezrich managed to sell
the rights of the tale to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and the critically acclaimed film The Social Network received eight
Academy Award nominations.

Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter at The New Yorker that many of the details
in the film were inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg had been dating longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-
American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2003. He also said he never had interest in joining any of the final
clubs. "It's interesting what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie
is actually a shirt or fleece that I own," Zuckerberg told a reporter at a start-up conference in 2010. "So there's all this
stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right."

Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. Time magazine named him Person of the
Year in 2010, and Vanity Fair placed him at the top of their New Establishment list. Forbes also ranked Zuckerberg at
No. 35—beating out Apple CEO Steve Jobs—on its "400" list, estimating his net worth to be $6.9 billion.

Family Life and Personal

On May 19, 2012—a day after the IPO—Zuckerberg wed his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. About 100 people
gathered at the couple's Palo Alto, California home. The guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation
from medical school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows. In May 2013, Facebook made
the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list.

In November 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan welcomed a daughter, Max, and Zuckerberg announced he would be taking
two months of paternity leave to spend with his family. He and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter
that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity. "We are committed to doing our small part to help
create this world for all children," the couple wrote in the open letter that was posted on Zuckerberg's Facebook page.
"We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to join many others in
improving this world for the next generation."

In September 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the company into which
they put their Facebook shares, would invest at least $3 billion into scientific research over the next decade to help
“cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The
Rockefeller University, was named the president of science at CZI.

They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a San Francisco-based independent research center that
will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A
partnership between Stanford University, University of California, San Francisco, and University of California,
Berkeley, Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years.

In March 2017, Zuckerberg and Chan announced on Facebook that they were expecting their second child. Daughter
August was born on August 28.
The CEO has undertaken a personal challenge at the start of every year since 2009, with previous efforts including
learning to speak Mandarin and only eating meat he had killed himself.

Steve Jobs Biography

Inventor (1955–2011)

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs' guidance, the company pioneered a series
of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.

Who Was Steve Jobs?

Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor, designer and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive and
chairman of Apple Computer. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen
as dictating the evolution of modern technology. Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who
gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different
pursuits before co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar
Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with
pancreatic cancer.

Wife and Children

Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school,
where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.

Although he remained a private man who rarely disclosed information about his family, it is known that Jobs fathered
a daughter, Lisa, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court
documents, claiming he was sterile. Chrisann struggled financially for much of her life, and Jobs did not initiate a
relationship with his daughter until she was seven years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father.

When and Where Was Steve Jobs Born?

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California.

Family and Early Life

Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students,
gave up their unnamed son, Steve Jobs, for adoption. Jobs’ father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor, and
his mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents
married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on
his biological parents.
As an infant, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and
Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View, California, within the area that
would later become known as Silicon Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage.
Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and
mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Education

While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal
schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him
to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal that
his parents declined.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after
six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one
course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left the company to find
spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

Apple Computer

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs’ family garage. They funded
their entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his beloved scientific calculator.
Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry with Apple by democratizing the technology
and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers.

Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and — with Jobs in charge of marketing — Apple
initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years
after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its very
first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple.

The next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, however, resulting in recalls and consumer
disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated
business world.

In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic,
youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-
compatible. Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out. Not
actually having had an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position
and thus left Apple in 1985.

Reinventing Apple

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs began a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT, Inc. The company
floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought
the company in 1996 for $429 million. In 1997, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO. Just as Jobs instigated Apple's
success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.

With a new management team, altered stock options and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back
on track. Jobs’ ingenious products (like the iMac), effective branding campaigns and stylish designs caught the attention
of consumers once again. In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod
and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product,
competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies.

Apple's quarterly reports improved significantly in 2007: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share—a record-breaking
number at that time — and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank and
zero debt. In 2008, Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America — second only to Walmart, fueled by
iTunes and iPod sales. Apple has also been ranked No. 1 on Fortune magazine's list of "America's Most Admired
Companies," as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Battle with Cancer

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of
immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pesco-vegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options.
For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple's board of directors nervous. Executives feared that
shareholders would pull their stock if word got out that their CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs' confidentiality took
precedence over shareholder disclosure. In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to
form, in subsequent years Jobs disclosed little about his health.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs' weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included
a liver transplant. Jobs responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. Days later, he
went on a six-month leave of absence. In an e-mail message to employees, Jobs said his "health-related issues are more
complex" than he thought, then named Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, as “responsible for Apple's day-
today operations."

After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event on
September 9, 2009. He continued to serve as master of ceremonies, which included the unveiling of the iPad, throughout
much of 2010. However in January 2011, Jobs announced he was going on medical leave. In August, he resigned as
CEO of Apple, handing the reigns to Cook, and in October he passed away.