Mark Zuckerberg

Early life

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, to Jewish parents Dr. Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist, and Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist. He and his three sisters (Arielle, Randi, and Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Their great-grandparents were emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland. Zuckerberg initially attended Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He was captain of the fencing team.

Zuckerberg learned computer programming in his childhood. At about the age of eleven, he created "ZuckNet", a program that allowed computers at the family home and his father's dental office to communicate with each other. During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. The New Yorker once said of Zuckerberg, "some kids played computer games. Mark created them." While still in high school, he attended Mercy College taking a graduate computer course on Thursday evenings.

Sanctions & controversy

In June 2010, then-Pakistani Deputy Attorney General Muhammad Azhar Sidiqque launched a criminal investigation into Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes after a "Draw Muhammad" contest was hosted on Facebook. The investigation also named the anonymous German woman who created the contest. Sidiqque asked the country's police to contact Interpol to have Zuckerberg and the three others arrested for blasphemy. On May 19, 2010, Facebook's website was temporarily blocked in Pakistan until Facebook removed the contest from its website at the end of May. Sidiqque also asked its UN representative to raise the issue with the United Nations General Assembly.

Yachts & assets

In 2017, Zuckerberg called for action to stop global warming in a commencement speech at Harvard University. Seven years later, he purchased the mega-yacht Launchpad (formerly Project 1010) for about $300 million; the vessel is approximately 118–119 m (387 ft) and was delivered by Feadship in 2024. Zuckerberg also operates a smaller support/shadow yacht, Wingman, built by Damen Yachting in 2014 (approx. 67 m/220 ft), which functions as a tender and logistics platform for Launchpad; media have placed its value around $30 million. In early 2025, multiple outlets reported the two-vessel fleet operating together, including in the Arctic. Launchpad was tracked at Longyearbyen (Svalbard), where local activists staged protests over emissions. During the Easter period of 2025, Sustainability Times described a roughly 5,280-mile voyage to Norway's fjords using the two-yacht fleet for a heliskiing trip. The article asserted by using Wingman's helipad offshore, operations avoided helicopter landings on Norwegian soil, which are generally restricted for tourism. Earlier, in late 2024 and early 2025, lifestyle media reported that Launchpad sailed roughly 4,800 miles to French Polynesia and waited in Tahiti for weeks without Zuckerberg boarding.

Career

A movie based on Zuckerberg and the founding years of Facebook, The Social Network, was released on October 1, 2010, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. After Zuckerberg was told about the film, he responded, "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive." Also, after the film's script was leaked on the Internet and it was apparent that the film would not portray Zuckerberg in a wholly positive light, he stated that he wanted to establish himself as a "good guy". The film is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which the book's publicist once described as "big juicy fun" rather than "reportage". The film's screenwriter Aaron Sorkin told New York magazine, "I don't want my fidelity to be the truth; I want it to be storytelling", adding, "What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy's sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?". Upon winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture on January 16, 2011, producer Scott Rudin thanked Facebook and Zuckerberg "for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other". Sorkin, who won for Best Screenplay, retracted some of the impressions given in his script:

I wanted to say to Mark Zuckerberg tonight, if you're watching, Rooney Mara's character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie. She was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist. In January 2011, Zuckerberg made a surprise guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, which was hosted by Jesse Eisenberg. They both said it was the first time they had met. Eisenberg asked Zuckerberg, who had been critical of his portrayal by the film, what he thought of the movie. Zuckerberg replied, "It was interesting." In a subsequent interview about their meeting, Eisenberg explained that he was "nervous to meet him, because I had spent now, a year and a half thinking about him ...". He added, "Mark has been so gracious about something that's really so uncomfortable ... The fact that he would do SNL and make fun of the situation is so sweet and so generous. It's the best possible way to handle something that, I think, could otherwise be very uncomfortable."

Personal life

Zuckerberg met fellow student Priscilla Chan at a frat party during his second year at Harvard. They began dating in 2003. In September 2010, Chan, who was a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco at the time, moved into his rented house in Palo Alto, California. They married on May 19, 2012, in the grounds of his mansion in an event that also celebrated her graduation from medical school. Zuckerberg revealed in July 2015 that they were expecting a baby girl and that Chan had previously experienced three miscarriages. Their first daughter was born in December 2015. They announced in a Chinese New Year video that their daughter's Chinese name is Chen Mingyu (Chinese: 陈明宇). Their second daughter was born in August 2017. Zuckerberg and his wife welcomed their third daughter in March 2023 and announced the news across his social media pages. The couple also have a Puli dog named Beast, who had over two million followers on Facebook as of 2019. Zuckerberg commissioned the visual artist Daniel Arsham to build a 7-foot-tall sculpture of his wife, which was unveiled in 2024. As of 2025, the Zuckerberg family lives on a large compound in the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto. In November 2025, WIRED published an investigation of complaints from neighbors about a school that was operating on the Zuckerberg property without a permit. In March 2026, Zuckerberg and Chan purchased a home on Indian Creek, Florida, a wealthy enclave known as the "Billionaires' Bunker", for a Miami-Dade County record of $170 million, an unfinished home that had an asking price of $200 million.