On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we look at one of the most influential (and richest) people on the planet, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. People tend to hate his world-changing social media platform, but they just can’t quit him and repeatedly go back to check their likes and update their profiles. Zuckerberg is a man surrounded by controversy, from the way the site started (and his alleged theft of intellectual property of the Winklevoss twins) to the ideas of fake news and foreign interference in modern day elections. He’s been called to congress and called to task, but he remains the king of social media.

Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984 (the year of Big Brother, for those looking for irony) in New York state. His family was well off, with a dentist father and a psychiatrist mother. He was a prodigy with computers and programming at a very young age, and he even created a messaging program that connected his father’s dentist office to their household. It was called Zucknet. Years later, he would become better at naming things.

His father hired a computer programmer to tutor his son, but in short order, he admitted that Zuckerberg knew more than he did. By the time he graduated from his prep school and went to Harvard, he had a reputation on campus as being the smartest guy in the room when it came to computers and coding.

While a sophomore, he riffed off of a thing that only an Ivy League school could have--they were called face books, physical books that had photos of everyone who lived on campus, so people could figure out who to have sex with. He created a digital version called Facemash (not quite there on the naming thing…), but it was shut down by the university within a week.

This creation led to him meeting the Winklevoss twins who had an idea for a social media platform to use on campus. He worked with them briefly and then set out to make his own, which he would call Facebook. Originally, it was designed to be used on the Harvard campus, but as it grew, it slowly competed with Myspace and spread to all colleges, not just Harvard. From there, it opened to the entire public; he and his three friends honed the software and improved it until it became a sensation. They worked out of dorms until they moved to Palo Alto in the heart of silicon valley and found investors. He turned down Yahoo! and MTV who both wanted to buy Facebook, all because he had a vision.

His vision paid off when his IPO on the stock market became the largest in the history of all tech companies and made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet overnight. But in spite of all the likes, Zuckerberg has met with multiple controversies in recent years. First, he was sued by the Winklevoss twins for millions. Then, he was blamed for a group called Cambridge Analytica which used information from tens of millions of Facebook users to tamper with the 2016 elections. This was an event that led to his (first) meeting with congress at a public hearing about his power and whether or not he uses it properly.

And though he comes off like a lizard person or a waxy skinned android, he has given away billions of dollars alongside his wife to various charities and aims to bring the internet to the poorest 1/3 of the globe who currently don’t have access to it. So give thumbs up or a thumbs down, but listen, laugh, learn.

 

Visit our Sources:

https://www.biography.com/business-figure/mark-zuckerberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

https://www.facebook.com/zuck