Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's almost unfathomable wealth is not his only source of fame. He was also the subject of a widely praised 2010 film directed by David Fincher about Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook as a Harvard undergraduate during the early 2000s, and the inner workings of his social media properties have been the subject of intense political scrutiny for more than a decade.
Facebook and Instagram's importance in the media ecosystem has made the decision-making inside Zuckerberg's organizations an issue of intense public debate. Yet Zuckerberg's dual role as tech titan and media mogul would have been difficult to imagine when Facebook was just a dorm room side project for Zuckerberg and his friends — one that unexpectedly turned into a globe-spanning media leviathan. His company's products are now part of everyday life, for better or worse, for billions of people around the world.
How he amassed his fortune
The story of Facebook's origins at elite Harvard University is well-known. Zuckerberg, who hails from Dobbs Ferry, New York, in suburban Westchester County, had already built sophisticated software before he got to the Ivy League. When he was "somewhere around 10 or 12 years old," Zuckerberg "built a chat service for his family — and for his dad’s dental business" that he called "ZuckNet," said Vox. In high school, he created a program called Synapse, "that would keep track of every song the user played on a computer" and after determining the user's preferences "would begin to make playlists" of recommended music," said The Harvard Crimson. Spotify would later turn that basic model into a multi-billion dollar business empire.
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At Harvard, Zuckerberg created Facemash, a "hot or not clone" which "had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus," said Business Insider. The site pulled student photos from Harvard's website and allowed users to pick which person was better looking, and Zuckerberg was nearly expelled for creating it. A group of students led by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra had been trying to find a programmer for a site they called Harvard Connections when Zuckerberg and several collaborators launched a website with a strikingly similar concept, called "TheFacebook." When it launched on February 4, 2004, "the site's membership was initially limited to Harvard students — with no Like button and no News Feed," said Yahoo News. Four months later, Zuckerberg had "secured an investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist." Meanwhile, as the company was taking off, the Winklevoss brothers and Narendra sued Zuckerberg and obtained "a settlement in 2008 that included 1.2 million shares in the company each," said The Independent. That lawsuit provided much of the drama in Fincher's movie "The Social Network."
In its original iteration as "Thefacebook.com," the site "was just a collection of profiles where people listed their favorite movies, quotes and that sort of thing," said Forbes. It was certainly not the first social networking site, an honor that belongs to Classmates.com, launched in 1995, and 1997's Six Degrees, which included "popular features such as profiles, friends lists and school affiliations in one service," said CBS News. But Zuckerberg's site took off and soon eclipsed existing leaders like MySpace.
By the end of 2004, Facebook had more than a million users, and in 2006, Yahoo "sought to buy Facebook for a billion dollars." In the end "Zuckerberg turned them all down," said The New Yorker. Membership for the site was initially restricted to people studying at Harvard, and then college and high school students. By 2006, Zuckerberg decided to open up membership on the site to anyone. The company "needed to relax its membership rules in order to keep up with its existing members after they graduated from college and got jobs," said The New York Times. Zuckerberg's big payday arrived in 2012, when he took the company public with an "initial public offering that valued Facebook at $104 billion," a staggering figure that was "higher than those of McDonald's, Citigroup, Amazon and all but a handful of other American companies."
Facebook ultimately "forever changed how people connect, how businesses make money, how politicians seize power, and how information flows across communities and cultures," said Wired. At one time, the site's networking properties were credited with helping dissidents topple authoritarian regimes, including in Egypt during the 2010-2011 Arab Spring. Facebook was a "place for venting the outrage resulting from years of repression, economic instability and individual frustration," said The New York Times, and activists created pages on the site that helped them coordinate efforts to overthrow the country's authoritarian regime. Zuckerberg's hot-or-not site had somehow transformed itself into a tool of revolution.
Not all of those changes are regarded as positive, as Facebook has more recently taken the blame for exacerbating partisan polarization in the United States, acting as a conduit for misinformation and using its algorithms to encourage unhealthy behavior and addiction. In a 2021 CNN poll, more than three-quarters of Americans said "that Facebook makes society worse, not better," and almost half said "they know someone who they think was persuaded to believe in a conspiracy theory because of content on Facebook," said CNN. Facebook is a "cruel portrait of us," all of its users "entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore," said Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books.
In 2021, Zuckerberg rebranded his company "Meta" to lean into the concept of a "virtual universe where people will roam freely as avatars, attending virtual business meetings, shopping in virtual stores and socializing at virtual get-togethers," said The Washington Post. Zuckerberg's Metaverse "became the obsession of the tech world and a quick hack to win over Wall Street investors," but the concept flopped spectacularly because when "offered the opportunity to try it out, nobody actually used the Metaverse," said Business Insider. The company is investing billions in artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, including "its own humanoid robot hardware, with an initial focus on household chores," said Yahoo News. Today, the company has a market cap of $1.69 trillion. Facebook has more than three billion active users worldwide, with another two billion each on Meta platforms Whatsapp and Instagram. The company "primarily makes money by selling advertising space on its various social media platforms," said Investopedia.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, operate the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a "philanthropic investment company" that is "one of the most well-funded philanthropies in human history," said Vox. When the initiative was announced, Zuckerberg and Chan were said to "donate 99% of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes" to the initiative, said The Guardian. Today, Forbes lists Zuckerberg as the world's second-richest individual, behind Elon Musk, with a net worth of $230.7 billion as of March 1, 2025. Bloomberg estimates his wealth at the slightly higher level of $236 billion.
