One of the youngest billionaires in the world, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, Zuck to his friends, was born in New York on May 14, 1984. His father was a dental practitioner and his mother a psychiatrist. With three sisters, he is the only son in the Zuckerberg family.

Mark showed an interest in computers at a very early age. As a 12-year old boy he created a messaging program which he named Zucknet. Mark’s father used this invention at his practice, and the family also used it for communication. Later on, together with his friends he created games for his own entertainment.

During high school, programming was his hobby, but the turning point in his development as a programmer was when he went to Harvard, which he, like many other successful entrepreneurs, started but never graduated from. Interestingly enough, he studied psychology and programming was just a hobby at the time. For his “college crew”, he had already developed a number of social networking sites such as CourseMatch which linked students within their colleges, as well as Facemash where users could rate people’s attractiveness.

American magazine Time named Mark as one of the most influential people in the worldin 2008, hence he was included in the category of scientists, with a high ranking position of 52nd out of 101.

However, “D Day” for Mark was on February 4, 2004 when alongside with three of his college roommates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes he launched the internet site www.facebook.com from the college dormitory. The website was intended for friends to socialise, keep up correspondence and exchange photos, and this group of students was unaware that Facebook would bring them fame and fortune one day. Mark later stated that the idea occurred to him while he was arranging his journals and the photos they contained, and they were referred to as Facebook.

At first exclusively intended for Harvard students, this site never gave any indication of becoming a global phenomenon. Nevertheless, in the course of time, the number of users grew, and access was granted to students from all of the colleges in Boston from the so-called Ivy League. The year of 2006 marked a major milestone for the global popularity of Facebook, when the introduction of the application News Feed allowed its users to see what their friends were doing at all times and this social networking site was accessible to anyone older than 13. This marked the beginning of a new era in which a local college network became a global social networking site.

The popularity of Facebook was accompanied by money and fame, which ranked Mark Zuckerberg among the youngest billionaires in the world at the age of 23. In 2006, the search engine Yahoo offered Zuckerberg $1 billion to buy off the copyrights to his site, which Mark turned down. In 2012, the value of Facebook reached $1 billion, which meant that Mark had not made the wrong decision.

My friends are people who are engaged in creating extraordinary things.

Harvard also played an important role in Mark Zuckerberg’s private life. It was at college that the founder of the world’s most popular social networking site met his wife Priscilla Chan. Their relationship of nine years led to marriage in May, 2012 one day after Facebook went public. In the same way that he does not like to appear in the media and keeps his private life away from the public eye, his wedding was modest, held in the yard of their house in California, with the wedding ring designed by Zuckerberg himself.

Although he claims that many of the details are wrong, Mark Zuckerberg’s life has its Hollywood version in the film The Social Network from 2010. The film received three Oscars, four Golden Globes, and two BAFTA awards, with Jesse Eisenberg in the role of the Facebook creator.

Aside from the ongoing stories about Facebook’s waning popularity, Zuckerberg and his company have been on a roll. Facebook employs approximately ten thousand people. Mark Zuckerberg extended his wealth by $10.6 billion in 2014. His company was very successful in 2014 owing to the success of mobile advertising, and the 2012 investment also paid off when they bought Instagram for $1 billion which, according to Citigroup analyst estimates, is now worth $35 billion. Besides Instagram, the company owns WhatsApp, Oculus and PrivateCore as well.

Mark Zuckerberg is well-known for taking on a new challenge every year. In previous years he has learned Mandarin, met one person a day who worked outside of Facebook, shown appreciation to people who have made the world a better place, become a vegetarian, and one year he only ate the meat of animals he had killed himself, and he wore a tie. In 2015 he set himself the goal of reading one book every other week during 2016. He opened a Facebook page “A Year of Books” where he will write about what he reads and he has invited other users to do so and take part in discussion. The first book to open this year’s challenge is “The End of power” by Moisés Naím. The symbolism in the book’s title makes us ask ourselves what might bring Mark Zuckerberg’s power to an end. He has presented his plan for 2016 on his Facebook profile.

“You can think of it like Jarvis in ‘Iron Man’”, he wrote, referring to the robot from comic books and films by American publisher Marvel.

He is going to start his project by exploring the existing technology, then he will teach his robot to recognize his voice in order to control everything in his home: music, lights, temperature.

He wants his assistant to let his friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell, wrote the founder of Facebook. The robot should process the data visually in order to help his “father” Zuckerberg at work.

Zuckerberg wrote that development of the robot should be “a fun intellectual challenge” for him and he announced he would share his experiences during the project with his friends on Facebook.

“We talk about social networks in the plural, but I don't see anybody other than Facebook out there. Just Facebook, They are dominating this”, Steve Jobs said to Walter Isaacson, the author of Jobs’ biography. “I admire Mark Zuckerberg. I hardly know him, nevertheless, I admire him for not selling out Facebook, for wanting to make a company out of it. I admire that a lot”, said Jobs.

Little-known facts about this social network: - Hackers try to break into 600,000 Facebook accounts every day. - If you are bored by Facebook and you want a change, you can set the language to “Pirate”. - Facebook used a photo of Al Pacino as its logo at the beginning. - Smart phone users check their Facebook fourteen times on average per day. - The main reason why Facebook is blue is the fact that Zuckerberg is color blind but is able to see blue. - It is estimated that about 30 million Facebook accounts belong to deceased people. - Facebook has been blocked in China, North Korea and Iran. - One third of divorce petitions in the USA in 2011 contained the word Facebook. - You cannot block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. - It is estimated that 8.7% of Facebook accounts are fake. - My Space wanted to acquire Facebook back in 2005 but the company refused to pay $75 million which was Zuckerberg’s asking price. - Cristiano Ronaldo is the most followed person on Facebook.