Mark Elliot Zuckerberg Harvard University

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg Information

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is a business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist from the United States. He is best known for co-founding Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is the chairman, CEO, and controlling shareholder.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he co-founded Facebook with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in February 2004. Initially launched on a few college campuses, the site quickly grew and eventually expanded beyond colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. In May 2012, Zuckerberg took the company public with a majority stake. He became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2007, at the age of 23.

According to Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires, Zuckerberg's net worth was $49.4 billion as of October 2022, making him the world's 23rd richest person.

Since 2008, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg one of the world's 100 most influential people as part of its Person of the Year award, which he received in 2010. Zuckerberg was ranked tenth on Forbes' list of The World's Most Powerful People in December 2016. In the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans in 2022, he was ranked 11th with a net worth of $57.7 billion, down from third place in 2021 with a net worth of $134.5 billion.

On the 10th and 11th of April, 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about Facebook's use of personal data in connection with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Content:

• 1 Early life
• 1.1 Software development
• 1.1.1   Early years
• 1.1.2   College years
• 2       Personal life
• 3 Career
• 3.1 Facebook
• 3.2 Other projects
• 4 Controversies and lawsuits
• 4.1 ConnectU lawsuits
• 4.2 Eduardo Saverin
• 4.3 Pakistan Criminal Investigation
• 4.4 Paul Ceglia
• 4.5 Hawaiian land ownership
• 4.6 Testimony before U.S. Congress
• 5 Politics
• 6 Depictions in media
• 6.1 The Social Network
• 6.2   Disputed accuracy
• 6.3 Other depictions
• 7 Philanthropy and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Early Life

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, to psychiatrist Karen (née Kempner) and dentist Edward Zuckerberg. He and his three sisters (Arielle, businesswoman Randi, and writer Donna) were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in a Reform Jewish household. His ancestors were Jewish immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland. He went to Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He was the fencing team's captain.

Software Development

     Early Years

In middle school, Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software. He wrote a program in high school that allowed all of the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with one another. During his high school years, Zuckerberg worked on the Synapse Media Player, a music player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, according to a Slashdot post, and received a 3 out of 5 rating from PC Magazine. According to a New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg, "some kids played computer games." They were made by Mark.

     College Years

According to The New Yorker, by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already established a "reputation as a programming prodigy." He majored in psychology and computer science and was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. In his sophomore year, he created CourseMatch, a program that allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to form study groups. A short time later, he created Facemash, a different program that allowed students to choose the best-looking person from a selection of photos. Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, Arie Hasit, explained:

Face Books were books that contained the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. Initially, he created a website and posted two pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site were asked to vote on who was "hotter," and the results would be ranked.

The site went live over the weekend, but by Monday morning, it had been taken down because its popularity had overloaded one of Harvard's network switches, preventing students from connecting to the Internet. Furthermore, many students complained that their photographs were being used without their permission. Zuckerberg publicly apologized, and the student newspaper published articles claiming that his site was "completely inappropriate."

Personal Life

During his sophomore year at Harvard, Zuckerberg met his future wife, Priscilla Chan, at a frat party. They started dating in 2003. Chan, who was then a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, moved into Zuckerberg's rented house in Palo Alto, California, in September 2010. They married on the grounds of his mansion on May 19, 2012, as part of an event commemorating her medical school graduation. On July 31, 2015, Zuckerberg announced that they were expecting a girl and that Chan had previously miscarried three times.

On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg was born. In a Chinese New Year video, they revealed that their daughter's Chinese name is Chen Mingyu (Chinese). August, their second daughter, was born in August 2017. On September 21, 2022, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that they are expecting their third child, a daughter, in 2023. The couple also has a Puli dog named Beast, who has over two million Facebook followers.

Zuckerberg, who was raised as a Reform Jew, later identified as an atheist, but stated in 2016: "I was raised Jewish, and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important."

In 2017, Zuckerberg and his wife embarked on a cross-country tour "to learn more about a sliver of the nearly two billion people who regularly use the social network." He met with farmers, and business owners, and even spoke at Mother Emanuel, the location of the 2015 shooting.

In an August 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg expressed regret about competing on the fencing team in high school rather than wrestling. Motherboard impliedly criticized this by comparing it to Facebook's "enabling genocide in Myanmar because it did not bother to hire moderators who spoke Burmese," an incident for which Zuckerberg apologized at the time. He also expressed regret in the same interview that Facebook had throttled posts about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.

Career

    Facebook

     History Of Facebook

The site went live over the weekend, but by Monday morning, it had been taken down because its popularity had overloaded one of Harvard's network switches, preventing students from connecting to the Internet. Furthermore, many students complained that their photographs were being used without their permission. Zuckerberg publicly apologized, and the student newspaper published articles claiming that his site was "completely inappropriate."

In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website the following semester. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg and his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes launched "Thefacebook," which was originally located at thefacebook.com. An earlier source of inspiration for Facebook could have been Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school where Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It created its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book," which students dubbed "The Facebook." At many private schools, such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience. Students could use them to record information such as their class years, friends, and phone numbers.

Six days after the site went live, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of deceiving them into thinking he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, when in fact he was using their ideas to build a competing product. In response to the three complaints, The Harvard Crimson launched an investigation. While Zuckerberg was attempting to persuade the editors not to run the story, he broke into two of the editors' email accounts. He did it using TheFacebook's private login data logs from the editors.

Following the official launch of Facebook, the three filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, which resulted in a settlement. The settlement consisted of 1.2 million Facebook shares and $20 million in cash.

Zuckerberg's Facebook began as a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to expand it to other schools with the assistance of their roommate Dustin Moskovitz. Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale were the first.

To complete the project, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and the other co-founders relocated to Palo Alto, California, and rented a small house to use as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who invested in the company. In mid-2004, they opened their first office. According to Zuckerberg, the group intended to return to Harvard, but they ultimately decided to stay in California, where Zuckerberg appreciated the "mythical place" of Silicon Valley, California's center of computer technology.

They had already turned down buyout offers from major corporations. In a 2007 interview, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning: "It's not because of a lack of funds. The most important thing for me and my colleagues is that we create an open information flow for people. Conglomerates owning media corporations is simply not appealing to me." The following year while speaking at Y Combinator's Startup School course at Stanford University, Zuckerberg made the contentious claim that "young people are just smarter" and those other entrepreneurs should hire young people.

In 2010, he told Wired magazine, "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open." Previously, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of former Netscape CFO Peter Currie on Facebook financing strategies. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg announced that the company had reached 500 million users. When asked if Facebook could earn more money from advertising as a result of its explosive growth, he responded:

I suppose we could... Consider how much of our page is devoted to advertisements in comparison to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10% of the pages, while the average for search is around 20% of the pages... That's the most basic thing we could do. But that is not how we are. We make a good living. Right, I mean, we keep things running; we grow at the rate we want to grow.

                    

Zuckerberg and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev during their meeting at the Russian leader's residence outside Moscow, October 1, 2012

Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution in 1984, wrote in 2010 that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a hacker." "It's OK to break things," Zuckerberg said, "to make them better." Every six to eight weeks, Facebook held "hackathons" in which participants had one night to come up with and complete a project. At the hackathons, the company provided music, food, and beer, and many Facebook employees, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended. "The idea is to build something really good in a night," Zuckerberg explained to Levy. "And that's now part of Facebook's personality... It's undeniably central to my personality.

In 2007, Zuckerberg was named to the MIT Technology Review's TR35 list as one of the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. Vanity Fair magazine ranked Zuckerberg first among the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age" in 2010. In 2009, Zuckerberg was ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list. In 2010, Zuckerberg was ranked 16th in the New Statesman's annual list of the world's 50 most influential people.

In a 2011 interview with PBS, shortly after Steve Jobs's death, Zuckerberg stated that Jobs advised him on how to build a management team at Facebook that was "focused on building as high quality and good things as you are."

The Washington Post reported on August 19, 2013, that Zuckerberg's Facebook profile had been hacked by an unemployed web developer.

At the September 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Zuckerberg stated that he is working on registering the 5 billion people who were not connected to the Internet at the time of the conference on Facebook. Zuckerberg then explained that this is linked to the goal of the Internet.org project, in which Facebook seeks to increase the number of people connected to the Internet with the help of other technology companies.

In March 2014, Zuckerberg was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC), which was held in Barcelona, Spain, and was attended by 75,000 delegates. Several media outlets emphasized the link between Facebook's emphasis on mobile technology and Zuckerberg's speech, stating that mobile represents the company's future. Zuckerberg's speech expands on his goal, which he stated at the TechCrunch conference in September 2013, of expanding Internet coverage into developing countries.

On December 8, 2014, Zuckerberg, along with other American technology figures such as Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, hosted visiting Chinese politician Lu Wei, known as the "Internet czar" for his influence in the enforcement of China's online policy, at Facebook's headquarters. The meeting took place after Zuckerberg took part in a Q&A session at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2014, where he conversed in Mandarin Chinese; while Facebook is banned in China, Zuckerberg is well-liked by the Chinese people and was at the university to help fuel the country's burgeoning entrepreneur sector.

On December 11, 2014, Zuckerberg took questions during a live Q&A session at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park. The founder and CEO stated that he does not consider Facebook to be a waste of time because it facilitates social engagement and that his participation in a public session was to "learn how to better serve the community."

As CEO of Facebook, Zuckerberg is paid one dollar. In June 2016, Business Insider named Zuckerberg, along with Elon Musk and Sal Khan, one of the "Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" because he and his wife "pledged to give away 99% of their wealth—estimated at $55.0 billion."

On May 25, 2017, Zuckerberg received an honorary degree from Harvard after giving a commencement speech at Harvard's 366th commencement Day.

Zuckerberg announced plans in January 2019 to integrate an end-to-end encrypted system for three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Facebook will integrate the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger on both iOS and Android devices on August 14, 2020. The update encouraged users of Instagram and Facebook to communicate with one another.

      Other Projects

A month after Zuckerberg launched Facebook in February 2004, Wayne Chang launched i2hub, another campus-only service. i2hub was primarily concerned with peer-to-peer file sharing. At the time, both i2hub and Facebook were gaining press attention and rapidly expanding in terms of users and publicity. In August 2004, Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D'Angelo, and Sean Parker launched Wirehog, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that foreshadowed Facebook Platform applications, which debuted in 2007.

In 2013, Zuckerberg launched Internet.org, which he described as a project to provide Internet access to the five billion people who did not have it at the time of the launch. In India, activists claimed that the project's limited internet violated the principle of net neutrality; Zuckerberg responded that a limited internet was preferable to no internet. Internet.org was decommissioned in India in February 2016, but Zuckerberg later met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss future possibilities.

Zuckerberg serves on the board of Breakthrough Starshot, a solar sail spacecraft development project he co-founded in 2016.

 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, rehearse for a speech in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016

. Zuckerberg and Chan have set a new lofty goal for the end of the century: to cure, manage, or eradicate all diseases. To that end, the couple's philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is committing significant financial resources over the next decade to help accelerate basic science research.

Controversies And Lawsuits

      ConnectU Lawsuits

Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of deceiving them into believing he would assist them in the creation of a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU). They filed a lawsuit in 2004, but it was dismissed on March 28, 2007, on a technicality. It was quickly refiled in federal court in Boston. Facebook filed a counter-suit about Social Butterfly, a project of The Winklevoss Chang Group, and an alleged collaboration between ConnectU and i2hub. The case was settled on June 25, 2008, with Facebook agreeing to transfer over 1.2 million common shares and pay $20 million in cash.

In November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of 02138, a Harvard alumni magazine. They included Zuckerberg's Social Security number, his parent's home address, and the address of his girlfriend. The judge ruled in favor of 02138 after Facebook filed a request to have the documents removed.

      Eduardo Saverin

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin sued Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2005, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally spent Saverin's money on personal expenses. The lawsuit was settled out of court, though the terms were kept secret. The company confirmed Saverin's status as a co-founder of Facebook, and Saverin agreed to stop speaking to the press.

     Pakistan Criminal Investigation

After a "Draw Muhammad" contest was held on Facebook in June 2010, Pakistani Deputy Attorney General Muhammad Azhar Sidiqque launched a criminal investigation into Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The investigation identified the contest's creator, an anonymous German woman. Sidiqque requested that the country's police contact Interpol to have Zuckerberg and the other three arrested for blasphemy. On May 19, 2010, Facebook's website was temporarily blocked in Pakistan until the contest was removed at the end of May. Sidiqque also asked its UN representative to bring the matter to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly.

     Paul Ceglia

Paul Ceglia, the owner of a wood pellet fuel company in Allegany County, New York, sued Zuckerberg in June 2010, claiming 84 percent ownership of Facebook and seeking monetary damages. According to Ceglia, he and Zuckerberg signed a contract on April 28, 2003, that stipulated that a $1,000 initial fee entitles Ceglia to 50% of the website's revenue, as well as an additional 1% interest in the business per day after January 1, 2004, until the website was completed. Zuckerberg was working on other projects at the time, including Facemash, the forerunner to Facebook, but he did not register the domain name thefacebook.com until January 1, 2004. The lawsuit was dismissed by Facebook management as "completely frivolous."

According to Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, Ceglia's counsel attempted but failed to reach an out-of-court settlement.

Federal authorities arrested Ceglia on October 26, 2012, charging him with mail and wire fraud as well as "tampering with, destroying, and fabricating evidence in a scheme to defraud the Facebook founder of billions of dollars." Ceglia is accused of fabricating emails to make it appear that he and Zuckerberg discussed details about an early version of Facebook, even though no mention of Facebook was found in their emails after investigators examined them.  Some law firms dropped out of the case before it was even started, while others dropped out after Ceglia was arrested.

     Hawaiian Land Ownership

In January 2017, Zuckerberg filed eight "quiet title and partition" lawsuits against hundreds of native Hawaiians, claiming ownership of small tracts of land. This land is part of Zuckerberg's purchase of 700 acres of land on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2014. According to Kapua Sproat, a law professor at the University of Hawaii, Zuckerberg's lawsuits are "the face of neo-colonialism." [86] In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg responded to the criticisms, stating that the lawsuits were a good-faith effort to pay the land's partial owners their "fair share." He dropped the lawsuits after learning that Hawaiian land ownership law differs from that of the other 49 states. Zuckerberg expressed regret for not taking the time to learn about the process and its history before proceeding.

     Testimony Before U.S. Congress

On the 10th and 11th of April, 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about Facebook's use of personal data in connection with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach. He has described the entire situation as a breach of trust between Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. Zuckerberg has refused to appear before a UK Parliamentary committee to give evidence on the matter.

The US Senate Commerce Committee unanimously voted on October 1, 2020, to issue subpoenas to the CEOs of three major technology companies, including Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Twitter's Jack Dorsey. The subpoenas sought to compel the CEOs to testify about the legal immunity granted to technology platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. Republicans in the United States claimed that the law unfairly shielded social media companies from accusations of anti-conservative censorship.

It was announced in March 2021 that Zuckerberg would testify before Congress again on March 26, 2021, when he would be questioned about Facebook's role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol Building.

Politics

   Zuckerberg registered to vote in Westchester County, New York, where he grew up, in 2002 but did not vote until November 2008. Elma Rosas, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, told Bloomberg that Zuckerberg is listed on voter rolls as "no preference," and that he voted in at least two of the previous three general elections, in 2008 and 2012.

Zuckerberg has never disclosed his political affiliation or voting record; some news outlets consider him a conservative, while others consider him a liberal.

Zuckerberg and  Barack Obama

Zuckerberg hosted his first fundraising event for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on February 13, 2013. On this occasion, Zuckerberg was particularly interested in education reform, and Christie's education reform work focused on teachers' unions and the expansion of charter schools. Later that year, Zuckerberg hosted a campaign fundraiser for Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who was running for the special Senate election in New Jersey in 2013.

Booker obtained a US$100 million pledge from Zuckerberg to Newark Public Schools in September 2010, with the support of Governor Chris Christie. In December 2012, Zuckerberg donated 18 million shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a community organization that makes grants in the field of education.

On April 11, 2013, Zuckerberg led the formation of FWD.us, a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization. The group's founders and contributors were primarily Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, with Joe Green, a close friend of Zuckerberg, serving as president. Although the group's goals include immigration reform, improving education in the United States, and enabling more technological breakthroughs that benefit the public, it has also been chastised for funding advertisements advocating for a variety of oil and gas development initiatives, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Keystone XL pipeline.

 Argentine President  Cristina Fernandez

In 2013, numerous liberal and progressive organizations, including The League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, Democracy for America, CREDO, Daily Kos, 350.org, and Presente and Progressives United, agreed to either pull or not buy Facebook ads for at least two weeks in response to Zuckerberg ads funded by FWD.us in support of oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline, and Republican United States opposition to Obamacare.

On June 20, 2013, a media report revealed that Zuckerberg actively engaged with Facebook users on his own profile page following the online publication of an FWD.us video. In response to a claim that the FWD.us organization is "just about tech wanting to hire more people," the Internet entrepreneur stated, "The bigger problem we're trying to address is ensuring that the 11 million undocumented people living in this country now and similar people in the future are treated fairly."

Zuckerberg with U.S. Secretary of State John Carry in June 2016 

In June 2013, Zuckerberg rode in a float with Facebook employees as part of the annual San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration. The company first took part in the event in 2011, with 70 employees, increasing to 700 in March 2013. The 2013 pride celebration was especially significant because it came after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional.

When asked about the PRISM scandal in mid-2013 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2013, Zuckerberg stated that the US government "blew it." He went on to say that the government did a poor job of protecting its citizens' freedoms, the economy, and businesses.

In response to the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino attack, Zuckerberg posted a statement on his Facebook wall on December 9, 2015, saying that he wants "to add my voice in support of Muslims in our community and around the world." According to the statement, Muslims are "always welcome" on Facebook, and his position stems from the fact that "as a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up to attacks on all communities."

In response to the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino attack, Zuckerberg posted a statement on his Facebook wall on December 9, 2015, saying that he wants "to add my voice in support of Muslims in our community and around the world." According to the statement, Muslims are "always welcome" on Facebook, and his position stems from the fact that "as a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up to attacks on all communities."

On February 24, 2016, Zuckerberg sent an internal memo to all employees formally rebuking employees who had crossed out handwritten "Black Lives Matter" phrases on company walls and replaced them with "All Lives Matter." Employees can freely write thoughts and phrases on company walls using Facebook. Several employees then leaked the memo. Because Zuckerberg had previously condemned this practice at previous company meetings, and other Facebook leaders had made similar requests, Zuckerberg wrote in the memo that he would now consider this overwriting practice not only disrespectful but also "malicious." According to Zuckerberg's memo, "Black Lives Matter does not imply that other lives do not matter - it simply asks that the black community receive the justice it deserves."

Zuckerberg on his way to meet President Donald Trump at the White House in September 2019

According to the memo, the act of crossing something out "means silencing speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's." In the memo, Zuckerberg also stated that he would launch investigations into the incidents. According to anonymous Facebook employees, "Zuckerberg was genuinely angry about the incident, and it really encouraged staff that Zuckerberg demonstrated a clear understanding of why the phrase 'Black Lives Matter must exist, as well as why writing through it is a form of harassment and erasure."

In January 2017, Zuckerberg slammed Donald Trump's executive order restricting immigrants and refugees from certain countries.

Zuckerberg funded a state-level ballot initiative for the 2020 general election that would raise taxes by amending California's Proposition 13 to require the taxation of commercial and industrial properties in the state to be assessed at the market rate.

Depictions in media

     The Social Network

The Social Network, a film based on Zuckerberg and the early years of Facebook, was released on October 1, 2010, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. When told about the film, Zuckerberg said, "I just wish nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive." Also, after the script for the film was leaked on the Internet and it became clear that the film would not portray Zuckerberg in a completely positive light, he stated that he wanted to establish himself as a "good guy." The film is based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, which a publicist once described as "big juicy fun" rather than "reportage."

"I don't want my fidelity to be the truth; I want it to be storytelling," the film's screenwriter Aaron Sorkin told New York magazine, 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?"

Mark Zuckerberg                     Jesse Eisenberg

On January 16, 2011, when the film won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, 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 Best Screenplay, retracted some of his script's impressions: If you're watching tonight, Rooney Mara's character makes a prediction at the beginning of the film, which I wanted to mention to Mark Zuckerberg. She was mistaken. You proved to be a fantastic entrepreneur, visionary, and humanitarian.

On January 29, 2011, Zuckerberg appeared as a surprise guest on Saturday Night Live, hosted by Jesse Eisenberg. They both stated that it was their first meeting. [99] Eisenberg asked Zuckerberg, who had been critical of the film's portrayal of him, what he thought of it. "It was interesting," Zuckerberg said. [100] In a subsequent interview about their meeting, Eisenberg explained that he was "nervous about meeting him because I had spent now, a year and a half thinking about him..." "Mark has been so gracious about something that's really so uncomfortable," he added. It's so sweet and generous of him to do SNL and make fun of the situation.

It's the best way to deal with something that could otherwise be very uncomfortable.

       Disputed accuracy

According to David Kirkpatrick, former Fortune magazine technology editor and author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, (2011), "the film is only 40% true... he is not snide and sarcastic in a cruel way, as Zuckerberg is portrayed in the film." He concludes that "a lot of the factual incidents are accurate, but many are distorted, and the overall impression is false," and that "his motivations were primarily to try and come up with a new way to share information on the Internet."

Although the film depicted Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook to elevate his stature after failing to get into any of Harvard's elite final clubs, Zuckerberg stated that he had no interest in joining the clubs. Kirkpatrick agreed that the film's implication is "false." Former Facebook senior engineer Karel Baloun stated that the "image of Zuckerberg as a socially inept nerd is overstated... It is fiction..." He also denied the film's claim that he "would deliberately betray a friend."

       Other depictions

On October 3, 2010, Zuckerberg voiced himself in an episode of The Simpsons titled "Loan-a-Lisa." Lisa Simpson and her friend Nelson run into Zuckerberg at an entrepreneur convention in the episode. Zuckerberg tells Lisa that she does not need a college diploma to be extremely successful, citing Bill Gates and Richard Branson as examples.

Saturday Night Live mocked Zuckerberg and Facebook on October 9, 2010. Andy Samberg portrayed Mark Zuckerberg. "I thought this was funny," the real Zuckerberg was quoted as saying.

On October 30, 2010, Stephen Colbert presented Zuckerberg with a "Medal of Fear" at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear "because he values his privacy much more than he values yours."

Zuckerberg appears in the documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply near the end.

The South Park episode "Franchise Prequel" made fun of Zuckerberg. Epic Rap Battles of History released a rap battle video between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk on December 7, 2018.

Philanthropy and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Zuckerberg established the foundation Start-up: Education. On September 22, 2010, it was announced that Zuckerberg had donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools, Newark, New Jersey's public school system. The timing of the donation was noted by critics as being close to the release of The Social Network, which painted a somewhat negative portrait of Zuckerberg. In response to the criticism, Zuckerberg stated, "I was most concerned about the movie's timing because I didn't want the press surrounding The Social Network movie to be confused with the Newark project. I was thinking about doing it anonymously just to keep the two things separate." Newark Mayor Cory Booker stated that he and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had to persuade Zuckerberg's team that the donation should not be made anonymously.  According to journalist Dale Russakoff, the money was mostly squandered.

Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan

In 2010, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed "The Giving Pledge," in which they pledged to donate at least half of their wealth to charity over time, and they invited others among the wealthy to do the same. In the spirit of The Giving Pledge, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced in December 2012 that they would give the majority of their wealth to "advancing human potential and promoting equality" throughout their lives.

On December 19, 2013, Zuckerberg announced a donation of 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with the shares valued at $990 million based on Facebook's valuation at the time. The donation was recognized as the largest charitable gift on the public record for 2013 on December 31, 2013. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Zuckerberg and his wife topped the magazine's annual list of the 50 most generous Americans in 2013, having donated approximately $1 billion to charity.

In October 2014, Zuckerberg and Chan contributed $25 million to the fight against the Ebola virus disease, specifically the West African Ebola virus epidemic.

On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook stock, worth $45 billion at the time, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The funds would be transferred gradually throughout their lives, rather than immediately. Rather than forming a charitable corporation to which the value of the stock would be donated, as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and other billionaires have done, Zuckerberg and Chan chose the structure of a limited liability company (LLC).

According to some journalists and academics, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative engages in philanthrocapitalism.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative donated $600 million in 2016 to establish the tax-exempt charity Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a collaborative research space in San Francisco's Mission Bay District near the University of California, San Francisco, to encourage interaction and collaboration among scientists at UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University. Biohub and the discoverer's home institution would share the intellectual property generated. Unlike foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which allows the public unrestricted access and reuse of all research funded, Biohub retains the right to commercialize any research it funds. With Biohub's permission, inventors will be able to make their discoveries open-source.

CZ Biohub requires its investigators and staff scientists to publish submitted manuscripts and related data on preprint servers such as bioRxiv to increase access to scientific research and promote open science.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Zuckerberg donated $25 million to a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-backed accelerator looking for cures. He also announced $25 million in grants to support local journalism affected by the pandemic, as well as $75 million in advertisement purchases by Facebook, Inc. in local newspapers, where Facebook would market itself.

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