Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a United States technology entrepreneur and philantropist, chiefly known for co-founding Facebook. He is also a co-founder of Breakthrough Starshort, a developent project for solar sail spacecraft.

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dormitory room at Harvard University in 2004, together with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion users.

In 2007, the 23-year-old Zuckerberg became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

In May 2019, his estimated net worth was 73.6 billion.

Short facts about Mark Zuckerberg

Name: Mark Elliot Zuckerberg

Born: 14 May, 1984, in White Plains, New York City, USA

Residence: Palo Alto, California, USA

Alma mater: Harvard University (no degree)

Spouse: Priscilla Chan (married 2012)

Children: 2

Philanthropy

Zuckerberg signed The Giving Pledge on 9 December, 2010, the same date as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. All three of them pledged to donate at least 50% of their wealth to philanthropy over time. Two years later, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced that they would donate a majority of their wealth to “advancing human potential and promoting equality”. In December 2015, they announced that they would, over the course of their lives, give 99% of their Facebook shares to their limited liability company the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The organization has a focus on health and education.

Examples of projects supported by Zuckerberg

• Zuckerberg has donated un undisclosed amount to Diaspora, an open-source personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service.
• Zuckerberg founded the Start-up:Education foundation.
• Zuckerberg has donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools in New Jersey
• Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation on 31 December, 2013. At that date, the value of the gift was $990 million, making it the largest charitable gifts on public record for that year.
• In 2014, Zuckerberg and his wife donated $25 million to combat the West African Ebola epidemic.
• CZI announced their science program Chan Zuckerberg Science (CZS) in 2016, and pledge to do a $3 billion in investment over the next decade. The goal of the program is to help cure, manage or prevent all disease by the year 2100.
• In 2016, CZS announced that it would spend $600 million on Biohub to promote interaction and collaboration between scientists, engineers and other experts, especially those associated with Stanford University, UC Berkely and UC San Francisco.
• In 2017, CZI acquired the artificial intelligence scientific literature search engine Meta Inc.
• CZI has supported the Human Cell Atlas by funding 38 pilot projects and the creation of a data coordination platform.
• CZI has invested $24 million in Andela, a startup training software developers in Africa.
• In 2018, it was announced that CZI would pledge $30 million to the Reach Every Reader project.
• CZI supports Coding it Forward.

What’s Biohub?

Biohub is a medical science research center headquartered next to UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, with a satellite site at Standford. It is a collaborate effort by University of California San Franciso (UCSF), University of California Berkeley, and Stanford University, and aims to promote collaboration among scientists associated with those three universities.

Biohub is funded by a $600 million commitment from Chan Zuckerberg Science.

Of the scientists selected for the initial 47 research positions at Biohub, 19 came from Stanford, 15 from UCSF, and the rest from UC Berkely.

Biohub is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. It retains patent rights for projects funded by Biohub.