young inovator Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

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from wikipedia.Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard. He is currently one of the youngest billionaires in the world with personal wealth of US$4 billion in 2010. His success at Facebook has been mired in controversy regarding the start of the project, resulting in a huge out of court settlement being paid to former business associates.


Early life

Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York to a Jewish family and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter Academy, Mark went to school at Ardsley High School. “At high school, he excelled in the classics. He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy where he immersed himself in Latin. He also built a program to help the workers in his father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk and a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity.[6] In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.

Facebook

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the "Facebook." Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard-thing," until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to other schools with social contacts with Harvard.

ConnectU Controversy

Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Nishita Narendra accused Zuckerberg of fraudulently letting them believe he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU). They filed a lawsuit in 2004 but was dismissed without prejudice on March 28, 2007. It was refiled soon thereafter in U.S. District Court in Boston, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 25, 2007. At the hearing the judge told ConnectU parts of their complaint were not sufficiently pled and gave them the ability to refile an amended complaint. On June 25, 2008, the case was settled and Facebook agreed to pay a $65 million settlement.

As part of the lawsuit, in November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of Harvard alumni magazine 02138. They included Zuckerberg's social security number, his parents' home address and his girlfriend's address. Facebook filed to get the documents taken down, but the judge ruled in favor of 02138.