Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. A Harvard dropout, he is credited with developing and launching the online social networking website Facebook with the help of fellow Harvard student and computer science major Andrew McCollum as well as roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. He now serves as Facebook's CEO. In 2008, Forbes Magazine declared him "1 youngest billionaire on earth and possibly the youngest self-made billionaire ever", with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion USD. However, the validity of this label has also been met with controversy.[http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=4403341&page=1 ABC News: World's Youngest Billionaire: Here to Stay? ]

Early life

Mark Zuckerberg was born to a Jewish-American family and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He's a dentist's son. He first attended Ardsley High School and then the Phillips Exeter Academy where he was a resident of Browning House.

Zuckerberg was recruited by both Microsoft and AOL in his senior year due to a hacking project. Instead, he opted to attend Harvard University.

College years

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating his projects. An early project, Coursematch, allowed students to view lists of other students enrolled in the same classes. A later project, Facemash.com, was a Harvard-specific image rating site similar to Hot or Not. A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg's Internet access was revoked by administration officials. The computer services department brought Zuckerberg before the Harvard University Administrative Board, where he was charged with breaching computer security and violating rules on Internet privacy and intellectual property. 2. He is also a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi.

Facebook

Founding

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 15, 2004. It quickly became a success at Harvard and more than two-thirds of the school's students signed up in the first two weeks. Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford, Columbia and Yale and then to other Ivy League colleges and schools in the Boston area. By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty five schools.

Moving to California

Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California with Moskovitz, his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, and some friends during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in California, taking a leave of absence. To date, he has not returned as a student to the college. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto a few months later. Today, the company has seven buildings in downtown Palo Alto, forming what Zuckerberg calls an "urban campus".