Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born to Edward, and his wife Karen, in the city of White Plains, New York, on May 14, 1984. Edward was a dentist, while Karen worked as a psychiatrist. The young boy was brought up in the village of Dobbs Ferry, along with siblings Randi, Arielle, and Donna.

He pursued his education from the ‘Ardsley High School’, New York, and later the ‘Phillips Exeter Academy’ in New Hampshire, where he exhibited flair for astronomy, mathematics, physics, English classical literature, foreign languages.

The budding software developer began attending the ‘Harvard University’, majoring in psychology and computer science. During his days at the university, he built programmes titled ‘CourseMatch’ and ‘Facemash’.

He was accused of having stolen the ideas of senior students, Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who had planned on a social media site called ‘The Harvard Connection’. As a settlement to the lawsuit, Zuckerberg had to give the three seniors Facebook shares worth 300 million dollars.

‘Accel Partners’, a company dealing in growth equities, funded ‘Facebook’ with 12.7 million dollars. Two years later, Mark launched ‘Facebook Platform’ to enable software developers to use ‘Facebook’ to build other applications.

Within the next year, this brilliant software programmer introduced two other services within the ‘Facebook’ platform, called ‘Beacon’ and ‘Connect’.

‘Facebook’ was initially meant for students of ‘Harvard University’, but was later distributed to other educational institutions including ‘Yale’, ‘Dartmouth’, ‘Stanford’ and ‘Columbia’.

Zuckerberg introduced a new project in 2013, titled ‘Internet.org’, in collaboration with cell phone firms like ‘Qualcomm’, ‘Samsung’, ‘Opera Software’, ‘Ericsson’, ‘Microsoft’, ‘MediaTek’, and ‘Reliance’. The aim of the project was to enable widespread use of Internet in developing countries.

The same year, this software developer became the CEO and Chairman of the company ‘Facebook, Inc.’, and was offered one dollar as salary.

Zuckerberg shot to fame with his social networking site called ‘Facebook’, which started out as a connecting platform for students of ‘Harvard University’. Having reached out widely to the public, the site currently has 1.44 billion monthly users.

In 2010, this accomplished entrepreneur was named the ‘Person of the Year’, by ‘Times’ magazine.

In 2011, ‘The Jerusalem Post’, an Israeli newspaper, named him the one of the ‘Most Influential Jews’.

This successful entrepreneur has a net worth of 36 billion dollars, and has regularly featured on the ‘Forbes 400’ list.