mark zuckerberg phd

Mark Zuckerberg finally got his Harvard degree

Twelve years after famously dropping out to build Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg went back and got an honorary degree at Harvard University, addressing the 2017 graduates with a speech about the power to change the world and the importance of having "a sense of purpose."

“You are graduating into a world that needs purpose, and it’s up to you to create it,” Zuckerberg said, warning against cynicism. In his talk, he recognized numerous students who have already had significant personal achievements.

Zuckerberg ended by reciting part of a Jewish prayer for healing that he says he sings to his baby daughter.

Two days ago, he visited his old dorm room.

Related: Read the full text of Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard graduation speech

Zuckerberg isn't the only famous #Harvard17 speaker

Harvard's 2017 graduates were treated to speeches from other high-profile people:

Vice President Joe Biden

Biden gave an impassioned Class Day speech on Wednesday, urging grads to overcome apathy in a time of "upheaval."

Secretary of State John Kerry

Kerry was U.S. secretary of state, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and the 2004 Democratic candidate for president -- and he addressed Harvard's Kennedy School of Government grads. Talking about his advice for pursing a life of public service, he quipped , "I used to say, either run for office or get a degree from Harvard Kennedy School. With this White House I'd say, buy Rosetta Stone and learn Russian."

Acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates

Yates, a former acting U.S. attorney general who was fired by President Trump, shared with Harvard Law School her perspective on what happened when Trump signed a controversial executive order banning travel from seven Muslim countries -- and she decided not to uphold it. She spoke about "conscience" and risk, declaring, “Doing your job means you are not simply a reflection of someone else’s talents or opinions. You’re the person to whom a leader turns when he or she needs to hear the truth.”

Darth Vader James Earl Jones

Receiving an honorary degree -- on the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars -- James Earl Jones told the grads, "May the Force be with you."

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.

Hey Look: Mark Zuckerberg Finally Got His Harvard Degree

Facebook CEO receives degree 12 years after dropping out

Donning full cap and gown, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was awarded an honorary doctorate on Thursday at Harvard University, nearly 12 years after dropping out to focus on building the world’s largest social media company full-time.

Zuckerberg would later switch into a blue suit and tie and give the commencement speech, joking “you’ve now accomplished something I never could!” to the crowd.

With his mom and dad in attendance, Zuckerberg received the degree along with nine other honorary members. “Mom, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree,” said a post from Zuckerberg on his personal Facebook page.

He was a Psychology and Computer Science major during his time at Harvard, but dropped out in November 2005. His wife Priscilla Chan graduated from the university in 2007.

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Mark Zuckerberg called on Harvard’s graduates to help save the environment and cure all disease

Zuckerberg gave a passionate speech at Harvard Thursday — he teared up at one point near the end.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to change the world — and he thinks Harvard’s graduating class can and should be doing the same.

Zuckerberg gave the commencement address Thursday at Harvard College, the place where he founded Facebook before dropping out, and where he finally returned to receive an honorary degree.

The speech felt, at times, very political, and Zuckerberg mentioned a number of social, fiscal and environmental issues that are important to him throughout the address.

Among those issues was immigration. At one point late in the 30-minute-long speech, Zuckerberg started tearing up when talking about an undocumented high school student he mentors. The student may not get to go to college because he’s not a U.S. citizen. “It says something about our situation today that I can’t even say his name because I don’t want to put him at risk,” Zuckerberg said, visibly emotional.

Zuckerberg, 33, the youngest person to deliver a Harvard commencement address, gave his talk as attendees hid from the rain under ponchos and umbrellas. Zuckerberg’s speech, which he wrote himself, was impassioned, especially for the Facebook CEO who can be very scripted, especially in public.

Immigration wasn’t the only political theme Zuckerberg touched on during the speech. He also mentioned the rising cost of college education, the idea of a universal living wage, and the troubling effects of climate change. “It is time for our generation-defining great works,” he told students. “How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet? ... How about curing all diseases?”

Zuckerberg has said on numerous occasions now that he isn’t running for political office, but the speech gave those who believe that he’s preparing for a political run a lot of material to work with. He’s long positioned Facebook as a service void of political agendas, but it was clear from his speech Thursday that Zuckerberg himself has a lot of strong views on a lot of important issues.

All of these references were connected under the broader theme of “purpose,” and Zuckerberg used his time to impress upon students the need to build a better world for others — specifically, helping others find purpose in life.

“I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose,” Zuckerberg said toward the beginning of the address. “We’re millennials. We try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you that finding your purpose isn't enough. The challenge for our generation is to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.”

This is hard, Zuckerberg said, because the world is changing quickly and the kinds of things that used to give people purpose, like their jobs or their real-life communities, are changing, too.

“When our parents graduated, that sense of purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community,” he said. “But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in a lot of communities is declining. And a lot of people are feeling disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void in their lives.”

Zuckerberg said students should focus on three major ways to help instill more purpose in their own lives, but also in others’ lives: Tackling big projects, like curing all disease; creating equality, like making education affordable for everyone; and building better offline and online communities.

In the section on big projects, Zuckerberg talked about his own struggles in Facebook’s early days. He recounted a story of when his top-ranking executives and investors all wanted him to sell the company early on, but he resisted. Many of the executives quit, and Zuckerberg said his decision not to sell “tore our company apart.”

“I felt alone. And worse, it was my fault,” he said. “I wondered if I was just wrong. An imposter. A 22-year-old kid who had no idea how things actually worked.”

But then he added, “Now, years later, I understand that is how things work when there’s no sense of higher purpose.”

The focus on community in particular is something that Zuckerberg has long pushed, and its quite frankly the backbone of Facebook’s connect the entire world mission. He often refers to Facebook’s users as “the community,” and when he penned a near 6,000-word manifesto earlier this year on his vision for the world, it was titled “building global community.”

These beliefs are also visible in Zuckerberg’s philanthropic work, specifically his decision in late 2015 with wife Priscilla Chan to give away all of their wealth during their lifetime to philanthropic causes. That effort, which is driven by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is focused on things like curing all disease and personalized learning.

“Yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t going to be free,” Zuckerberg said. “People like me should pay for it. And a lot of you are going to do really well and you should to.”

If you want to watch the full speech, you can see it here at the 1:38:00 mark. And here’s a transcript if you want to read instead of listen.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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Mark Zuckerberg will get his Harvard degree after dropping out 12 years ago

By Nick Statt , is a Senior Producer on Decoder. Previously, he wrote about technology and gaming for Naavik, Protocol, and The Verge.

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Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard dropout and CEO of a company worth nearly $400 billion, will be getting a college degree more than a decade after leaving his classes behind. The Facebook co-founder and chief executive left Harvard’s undergraduate computer science program in the fall of 2005 to devote himself full-time to building the young social network, which even then was seeing meteoric growth. Now, 12 years later, Zuckerberg will be giving the commencement address to Harvard’s class of 2017 and nabbing an honorary degree in the process.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard back in 2005

The news was announced today in a post on Harvard’s website . “Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership has profoundly altered the nature of social engagement worldwide. Few inventions in modern times can rival Facebook in its far-reaching impact on how people around the globe interact with one another,” Harvard President Drew Faust said in a statement. “And few individuals can rival Mark Zuckerberg in his drive to change our world through the innovative use of technology, as well as his commitment to advance science, enhance education, and expand opportunity through the pursuit of philanthropy.”

Zuckerberg is of course not the first big name in Silicon Valley to have dropped out and gone on to find success. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Oregon before starting his company with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Bill Gates, a fellow Harvard dropout, also left school after just two years to co-found Microsoft with Paul Allen. Because of their shared history, Zuckerberg even made a slightly cringe-worthy video with Gates in which the younger entrepreneur asks the older, wiser Microsoft alum for tips on writing his commencement speech. (Gates gave one to Harvard 10 years ago, which Zuckerberg watched from the crowd incidentally because his future wife, Priscilla Chan, was graduating that year.)

In the typical cheeky fashion of a man whose net worth exceeds the GDP value of Myanmar, Gates left a comment on Zuckerberg’s Facebook post, telling him, “Always happy to help, Mark. Good luck on your speech. Hope the honorary degree helps you land your dream job…”

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University News | 11.8.2011

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg ’06 Back on Campus

The famous dropout makes recruiting calls at mit and harvard..

Dropping out of Harvard: a standard to aspire to.

Harvard unrolled the crimson carpet on Monday as famous (and infamous) Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ’06 returned to Harvard for his first official visit since dropping out to found the social networking giant in 2004. In an evening recruiting event in Farkas Hall (the recently endowed and renamed New College Theatre), Zuckerberg and two other senior Facebook officials answered students’ questions on a wide variety of topics, from Zuckerberg’s time at Harvard and the history of Facebook to issues of privacy, engineering, and scalability.

“I think it was a lot of fun,” said David J. Malan ’99 , senior lecturer in computer science (he directs Computer Science 50, the wildly popular introductory course ) and moderator of the discussion. “Students were hearing directly from this guy who was there, about how this whole phenomenon began.”

The event was also a chance to glimpse the workings of the mind behind Facebook. Zuckerberg mentioned his early interest in studying the classics at Harvard and spoke about other websites and applications he designed prior to creating Facebook. Among them were CourseMatch, a tool for seeing what courses friends were shopping, and Six Degrees to Harry Lewis, a precursor to Facebook that analyzed connections among people who appeared in the Harvard Crimson —in particular, the most common figure, McKay professor of computer science Harry Lewis (read an excerpted lecture from his computer-science course, “Bits,” here) . 

“I just like making stuff,” Zuckerberg said several times.  In one lighthearted story, he talked about a site he created where students could collaborate to comment on the historical significance of photographs of Roman antiquities—not coincidentally, a useful study tool for himself as well while he worked on building Facebook.

“He seemed like someone who’d be great to chat with in a common room,” said Alice Xiang, a junior concentrating in statistics. “He talked about philosophical issues like the future of the Internet, or what exactly a social network is. In his answers, we got to see a little bit of his world-view.”

Several students commented that the evening did not feel like a typical recruiting event. “They don’t need it,” said Wen-Yuan Yao, a junior and computer-science concentrator. “Just him being there was enough.”

Similarly, Malan remarked dryly, “I’m sure he’s aware that he brings quite the wave of enthusiasm.”

Indeed, Zuckerberg mania was present aplenty. Only 200 students were chosen, on the basis of résumé submissions, to receive coveted tickets to the Farkas Hall event, though many more applied. The selection process was mediated jointly by Facebook and Harvard’s Office of Career Services, with preference given to “students who have computer science and engineering backgrounds or other strong technical skills,” according to an informational e-mail sent last week to computer science students and affiliates. The chosen few lined up half an hour in advance to have their tickets and IDs checked.

For those left out, the Office of Career Services maintained live feeds of the event on Twitter  and, of course, its Facebook  page . This wasn’t enough for Chris Bock, 55, from Newton, the self-titled Chicken Man ; Bock parked what he calls his mobile office, a truck with glass walls and a scrolling neon sign, in front of Farkas Hall with a sign reading “Mark, My bags are packed & I’m ready to go to. I may be in Glass Box but I can assure you that all my thinking is outside the Box. There must be a place for my imaginative mind at Facebook. How about a job?” Sporting a baseball cap with miniature chickens bobbing up and down on springs, Bock insisted on the seriousness of his request and his devotion to Facebook. “I think it’s the most phenomenal thing in the whole wide world.”

Zuckerberg’s arrival made quite a splash elsewhere on campus as well. The student life blog Noice posted a tongue-in-cheek article entitled “Zuckerberg’s Visit and How to Impress Him.”  

“Everyone is very smitten with Mark,” said Malan of his department colleagues, “and are quite proud of his origins at Harvard and in particular in the computer-science department.”

Indeed, the effect of Facebook is strong at Harvard, where it all began. In Computer Science 50, students often use the Facebook platform and other social media to build their final projects. 

“Simply by being him and accomplishing what he has, he has gotten innumerable students excited about computer science,” said Malan. “In his skills, in his savvy, in his youth, I think he’s opened undergraduates’ eyes to what they, too, might accomplish. I daresay many a startup these days aspires to be the next Facebook.”

And perhaps Zuckerberg’s visit is the continuation of a new, illustrious tradition of world-famous Harvard dropouts. Zuckerberg mentioned a talk by Bill Gates '77, LL.D.  '07 that he attended while still at the College, in which Gates encouraged undergraduates to take time off to explore what they wanted to do. ( Gates's 2007 Commencement address is available here; his essay for Harvard Magazine's special issue commemorating the University's 375th anniversary is here .)

“I could swear he was looking at you when he said, ‘The next Bill Gates could be right in this room,’” says a character to the Zuckerberg character in the movie The Social Network . Perhaps the next Mark Zuckerberg was somewhere in the audience Monday.

Earlier in the day , a few hundred students and a few dozen reporters crowded the lawn between Lamont Library and Loeb House for Zuckerberg’s informal press conference. Security officers were present and erected white plastic gates for crowd control. Curious passersby inquired about the occasion and joined in.

Sophomore William Chen, who is taking Malan’s introductory course, had hoped for tickets to the recruiting event but was not one of the lucky few. He heard about the press appearance from a friend and decided to drop by.  “I’ve never seen Mark Zuckerberg before, and I thought it would be a good chance,” he said.

After a lengthy wait, a beaming Zuckerberg, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and flanked by Harvard officials, appeared to cheers and applause. When asked about the reasoning behind his visit to Harvard, along with his visit to MIT earlier in the day , he said, “There are a lot of really smart people here, and a lot of them are making decisions on where they’re going to work when they graduate in the next couple of weeks.” (He is scheduled to recruit at the Carnegie Mellon campus on Tuesday.)

Asked about what the company has yet to accomplish, he exclaimed, “Oh, we’re just getting started.” In the next five or 10 years, he expects the company to focus on “all of these products and industries that can be rethought now that you have this base of all these connections in place for people.”

Then, abruptly, less than five minutes after arriving, Zuckerberg said, “I think I gotta run,” and did just that, leaving students and reporters alike surprised by his sudden exit.

Another scene from The Social Network comes to mind: Zuckerberg’s business cards , reportedly labeled “I’m CEO…bitch!”

Harvard News Office coverage of the visit, with additional photos, is available here.

Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow Katherine Xue '13 is concentrating in chemical and physical biology.

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Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest billionaires.

Who Is Mark Zuckerberg?

Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. He was raised in the nearby village of Dobbs Ferry.

Zuckerberg’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children — Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house.

Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it."

Mark Zuckerberg’s Education

To keep up with Zuckerberg's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Zuckerberg. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy , an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.

Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse.

Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.

Mark Zuckerberg's College Experience

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University . After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to his new company, Facebook, full time.

By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users.

He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.

Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite.

Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg and Founding Facebook

Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin created The Facebook, a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site out of a dorm room at Harvard University until June 2004.

That year Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students.

Zuckerberg's company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub.

Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks . Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.

‘Harvard Connection’ and Legal Hurdles

Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up. However, in 2006, the business mogul faced his first big hurdle: the creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses.

Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks. After lawyers searched Zuckerberg's records, incriminating instant messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users' private information to his friends.

Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. "If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?" he said in an interview with The New Yorker . "I think I've grown and learned a lot."

Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their stock.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S MARK ZUCKERBERG FACT CARD

'The Social Network' Movie

In 2010, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Social Network was released. The critically acclaimed film received eight Academy Award nominations.

Sorkin’s screenplay was based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires , by writer Ben Mezrich. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters.

Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter at The New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg had been dating his longtime girlfriend since 2003. He also said he was never interested in joining any of the final clubs.

"It's interesting what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own," Zuckerberg told a reporter at a startup conference in 2010. "So there's all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right."

Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2010, and Vanity Fair placed him at the top of their New Establishment list.

Facebook IPO

In May 2012, Facebook had its initial public offering, which raised $16 billion, making it the biggest Internet IPO in history.

After the initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the early days of trading, though Zuckerberg is expected to weather any ups and downs in his company's market performance.

In 2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list.

Fake News and Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Zuckerberg was criticized for the proliferation of fake news posts on his site leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2018, he announced a personal challenge to develop improved methods for defending Facebook users from abuse and interference by nation-states. (Previous personal challenges began in New Year's 2009 and have included only eating meat he killed himself and learning to speak Mandarin.)

"We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools," he wrote on his Facebook page. "If we're successful this year then we'll end 2018 on a much better trajectory."

Zuckerberg came under fire again a few months later when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump ’s 2016 campaign, had used private information from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting its owners. The resulting outcry seemed to shake investors' confidence in Facebook, its shares dropping by 15 percent after the news became public.

Following a few days' silence, Zuckerberg surfaced on various outlets to explain how the company was taking steps to limit third-party developers' access to user information, and said he would be happy to testify before Congress.

On Sunday, March 25, Facebook took out full-page ads in seven British and three American newspapers, penned in the form of a personal apology from Zuckerberg. He promised the company would investigate all of its apps, and remind users which ones they can shut off. "I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time," he wrote. "I promise to do better for you."

Amid increasing calls for his resignation from investor groups, Zuckerberg traveled to Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers ahead of his two-day testimony, scheduled for April 10 and 11. The first day of hearings, with the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, was considered a tame affair, with some senators seemingly struggling to understand the business model that powered the social media giant.

The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day's testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was "inevitable."

Personal Wealth

The negative PR around the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica scandal seemingly did little to slow the company's progress: Facebook saw its stock close at a record $203.23 on July 6, 2018. The surge bumped Zuckerberg past Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest person, behind fellow tech titans Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Any gains were wiped out when Facebook shares dropped a staggering 19 percent on July 26, following an earnings report that revealed a failure to meet revenue expectations and slowing user growth. Nearly $16 billion of Zuckerberg's personal fortune was erased in one day.

The stock rebounded, and Zuckerberg remains one of the world's wealthiest people. In 2019, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg at No. 8 on its ‘Billionaires’ list—behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates (No. 2) and ahead of Google co-founders Larry Page (No. 10) and Sergey Brin (No. 14). The magazine estimated his net worth to be about $62.3 billion at the time.

In June 2019, Facebook announced it was getting into the cryptocurrency business with the planned launch of Libra in 2020. Along with developing the blockchain technology to power its financial infrastructure, Facebook established a Switzerland-based oversight entity called the Libra Association, comprised of tech giants like Spotify and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz.

The news again put Zuckerberg in the crosshairs of Congress, which summoned the CEO to testify before the House Financial Service Committee in October. Despite providing assurances that Facebook would withdraw from the Libra Association if the project failed to garner approval from regulators, Zuckerberg faced pointed questioning from skeptical lawmakers who cited the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and other past transgressions.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife

Zuckerberg has been married to Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2012. The longtime couple tied the knot one day after Facebook’s IPO.

About 100 people gathered at the couple's Palo Alto, California home for the ceremony. The guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Daughters

Zuckerberg has two daughters, Max, born on November 30, 2015, and August, born on August 28, 2017.

The couple announced they were expecting both of their children on Facebook. When Zuckerberg welcomed Max, he announced he would be taking two months of paternity leave to spend with his family.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Donations and Philanthropic Causes

Since amassing his sizeable fortune, Zuckerberg has used his millions to fund a variety of philanthropic causes. The most notable examples came in September 2010, when he donated $100 million to save the failing Newark Public Schools system in New Jersey.

Then, in December 2010, Zuckerberg signed the "Giving Pledge", promising to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members include Bill Gates , Warren Buffett and George Lucas . After his donation, Zuckerberg called on other young, wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit.

"With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts," he said.

In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity.

"We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children," the couple wrote in the open letter that was posted on Zuckerberg's Facebook page. "We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation."

In September 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the company into which they put their Facebook shares, would invest at least $3 billion into scientific research over the next decade to help “cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The Rockefeller University , was named the president of science at CZI.

They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub , a San Francisco-based independent research center that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University , the University of California, San Francisco , and the University of California, Berkeley , Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1984
• Birth date: May 14, 1984
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: White Plains
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest billionaires.
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Phillips Exeter Academy
• Harvard University

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Zuckerberg Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/mark-zuckerberg
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 24, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts.
• If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I've grown and learned a lot.
• Understanding people is not a waste of time.
• Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are.
• I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do. I think people really undervalue the option value in flexibility.
• What Facebook is today isn't a set of information, it's a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information. They are only going to do that as long as they trust us.
• Everything I do breaks, but I fix it quickly.
• I would personally rather be underestimated. It gives us latitude to go out and make some big bets.
• Apps aren’t the center of the world. People are.
• Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.
• Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.
• People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
• [T]he real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
• A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible.

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Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

Mark Zuckerberg

Circle of friends.

Three and a half years ago, Mark Zuckerberg (then a ­Harvard sophomore) and a couple of friends built a ­website to let them share photos and personal profiles with other Harvardians. ­Zuckerberg became CEO of the new enterprise, called Facebook. The social-networking site gradually opened its doors to students at other colleges and then high schools. Now that anyone with an e-mail address can register, the site has more than 30 million members, who use it to blog, share pictures, connect with old friends, and expand their networks.

In May, the company announced the Facebook ­Platform, which lets users build and share tools for personalizing their profile pages and adding, say, videos or music from other websites. The idea, says Zuckerberg, is that the personal connections people have made within Facebook will lead them to content that’s interesting to them.

The company is embroiled in a long-standing legal dispute with ConnectU, another networking site that originated at Harvard, over ownership of the initial source code and even the basic business idea. Still, Bloomberg reported in December that the privately held company’s value may be more than $1 billion, thanks largely to the site’s appeal to advertisers. As Facebook grows, so does its potential to become a major content distributor. Not a bad prospect for a programming project hatched in a dorm room.

Sanjit Biswas

Cheap, easy Internet access.

Sanjit Biswas worked on a system for connecting local residents to the Internet wirelessly. In 2006, a nonprofit group asked if the technology could help provide Internet service to the poor. Intrigued, Biswas took a leave of absence to cofound Meraki Networks in Mountain View, CA, and create wireless mesh networks that would link people to the Internet cheaply.

In most mesh networks, all the nodes that receive a particular data packet forward it on; but in Biswas’s version, the nodes “talk” to each other and decide, on the basis of the packet’s destination and their own signal strengths, which one of them should forward it. The protocol also takes into account changing network conditions, as users sign on or off, or, say, a passing truck blocks a node’s radio signal. Biswas’s protocol, combined with commonly available hardware components, allows Meraki to produce Wi-Fi routers that cost as little as $50. (The routers Biswas used at MIT initially cost $1,500.)

Here’s how a Meraki network works: a user plugs a router into a broadband Internet connection; that person’s neighbors stick routers to their windows, and a mesh network of up to hundreds of people forms automatically. Users can give away or sell Internet access to their neighbors. There are already Meraki-based networks in 25 countries, from Slovakia to Venezuela, serving more than 15,000 users.

Josh Bongard

Adaptive robots

Josh Bongard’s robot walks with a limp. But it’s impressive that it walks at all.

As a postdoc at Cornell, Bongard collaborated with roboticist Hod Lipson and PhD student Victor Zykov to develop a robot that can adapt to changes in its body or in the environment–a key advance for robots designed to work outside a controlled laboratory setting. ­Bongard, now an assistant professor of computer science, begins by programming his robot with basic information about its design, such as the mass and shape of each of its parts. In his standard demonstration, he then disconnects one of its four legs. To get a sense of its handicap, the robot rocks back and forth, activating two tilt sensors. It then builds a virtual model of itself, using simulation software, and uses that model to test new ways of walking despite its handicap. Once the robot has developed a successful simulation, it attempts to walk using the same technique.

Rodney Brooks, professor of robotics at MIT, says that Bongard’s work is interesting because it’s inspired by the way biological systems adapt. To meet roboticists’ future goals of creating self-configuring robots, Brooks says, “these sorts of ideas are going to be essential.”

Garrett Camp

Discovering more of the Web.

In 2001, Garrett Camp and two friends began working–“out of our bedrooms,” he says–on a tool to help people serendipitously discover interesting Web content. Camp, who was then a grad student in software engineering, has guided the research behind the site and the design of its architecture ever since. In May, eBay acquired the Web 2.0 “discovery engine” for approximately $75 million. As of July, more than three million users had downloaded the ­StumbleUpon toolbar; the simple interface consists of a row of about 15 buttons at the top of a Web browser. Clicking “I like it” when viewing a site amounts to a recommendation; clicking the thumbs-down button submits a negative review. Clicking “Stumble­” takes a user to one of more than 10 million sites recommended by friends or other users with similar interests. The system refines individual recommendations on the basis of the user’s previous reviews and the preferences of users whom the site judges to have similar tastes. So what kinds of sites has Camp stumbled upon? Take a sneak peek here.

Mung Chiang

Optimizing networks.

Mung Chiang likes to say that there’s nothing more practical than a good theory. An assistant professor of electrical engineering, he improves the design of telecommunications networks by applying the mathematics of optimization theory. Through industry collaborations, his algorithms are revolutionizing the backbone of the Internet, the broadband connections that bring data and video to homes and offices, and wireless networks of every stripe.

In one project, Chiang and coworkers found a way around the limits of the current Internet routing protocol, which sends packets along the shortest available paths on the network. It’s a seemingly straightforward strategy that ends up causing complex n­etwork-management problems. The researchers realized there were advantages to sending the occasional packet along a longer path; the new algorithm achieves the lowest computational cost possible for a routing protocol and increases network capacity by 15 percent–without adding equipment to the network.

Though the real-world impact of his work matters to Chiang, he says another important motivation is the beauty of an airtight mathematical proof. “I’m an engineer at heart,” he says, “and a mathematician in my brain.”

Tadayoshi Kohno

Securing systems cryptographically.

Our reliance on the Internet is increasing all the time. Tadayosh­i Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering, worries that even if our data is encrypted, hackers can still glean information about us by working around the codes. For instance, someone tapping into your system might not be able to view the movie you’re watching but could guess its title from properties such as the file size and the compression algorithm used.

So Kohno invented the concept of systems-oriented provable security. Traditionally, cryptologists have assumed that a security protocol is unbreakable if no one they show it to can crack it. But with provable security, they use sophisticated math to show that cracking a given code would require someone to decipher a cryptographic “building block” that’s known to be secure.

Kohno extended this technique to the system level, examining everything from the software that compresses a file to the Internet protocols used to send it. He searches for weak points that might leak identifying information and writes provably secure algorithms to protect them. One of his schemes can handle data transmitted at 10 gigabits per second, the new Internet standard–a rate that overwhelmed previous security protocols. The U.S. government is incorporating a derivative of the scheme into an official encryption standard; Kohno anticipates that banks and corporate networks will use it as well.

Building a personal, dynamic Web page.

“When I open my Web browser, I want to get the latest stuff that’s really important to me ,” says software engineer, Web entrepreneur, and former journalist Tariq Krim. That’s the idea behind Netvibes, a free and “agnostic” Web service Krim created to let netizens build customized pages from disparate modules such as RSS feeds from blogs, competing news sites such as Google and Yahoo, and even user-translated international sites. On the “Tariq” tab of his own ­Netvibes page, Krim uses search modules to track what bloggers are saying about him and his company. A portion of his page is shown below.

Ivan Krstic´

Making antivirus software obsolete

Ivan Krstic takes extracurricular activities to the extreme. Born in Croatia, he received a scholarship to attend a Michigan high school when he was 13. While there, he wrote software to interpret data for a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. He also spent two summers in Croatia, building a patient-management computer system for Zagreb Children’s Hospital. He enrolled at Harvard in 2004 but then took a year’s leave to return to Croatia and reëngineer the Zagreb hospital’s IT system–after a month-long detour to Silicon Valley to help scale up Facebook’s software architecture.

Krstic returned to Harvard in 2005 to work on a degree in computer science and theoretical math, but he took another leave last spring to become director of security architecture for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, which is building inexpensive laptops for Third World children. His mandate was to create a secure system that children could use, and that wouldn’t need the tech support and continual updates that current anti­virus programs require.

So he set about making such software obsolete, building into OLPC’s Linux-based operating system a ­security platform called Bitfrost, named after Bifröst, a bridge in Norse ­mythology that reaches from Earth to heaven and that intruders can’t cross. Instead of blocking specific viruses, the system sequesters every program on the computer in a separate virtual operating system, preventing any program from damaging the computer, stealing files, or spying on the user. Viruses are left isolated and impotent, unable to execute their code. “This defeats the entire purpose of writing a virus,” says Krstic.

Some in the Linux community are so impressed with this novel approach to fighting malicious code that they have proposed making it part of the Linux standard. But since Bitfrost will allow only programs that are aware of it to run, it would make Linux incompatible with existing applications. The solution is for programmers to create “wrappers,” small programs tacked onto existing applications to enable them to communicate with Bitfrost. After OLPC’s computer ships late this year, Krstic plans to return to Harvard–and to help write those wrappers. It’s just one more ­extracurricular activity to take on.

Jeff LaPorte

Internet-based calling from mobile phones.

Problem: If you’re at your computer, you can use Skype and similar programs to make zero-cost domestic and international phone calls. But if you’re forced to use your mobile phone for an international call, you pay exorbitant rates. Sending mobile calls over the Internet, as Skype does with PC calls, would be cheaper–but the big carriers don’t offer such a service, and their clout with handset manufacturers makes it hard for third-party developers to create easy-to-use Internet calling software.

Solution: Jeff LaPorte conceived a clever end run around the wireless carriers and cofounded Eqo Communications of Vancouver, British Columbia, to market the idea. When an Eqo (pronounced “echo”) user dials an international number, software downloaded to the phone actually connects the call to a local Eqo number. From there, an Eqo server converts the user’s voice into data packets and sends them over the Internet to an Eqo server in the destination country, which puts the call back onto the wireless voice network. There are no complicated settings to configure or 800 numbers to dial, and calls sound as good as they do with standard wireless technology. Calls from one Eqo member to another are free, and other international calls can cost as little as 5 percent of what the major carriers charge. Eqo members must still have domestic wireless calling plans–but in LaPorte’s words, Eqo effectively “turns your local minutes into inter­national ­minutes.”

Bringing body language to computer-animated characters.

A crowded sidewalk is a ca­cophony of unspoken yet unmistakable messages. A young woman’s “I feel sexy” walk, for instance, is instantly distinguishable from a biker dude’s “Don’t mess with me” stride. But getting computer-generated (CG) characters to reproduce physical attitudes like these is still an arcane craft. Animators must either eyeball characters’ movements in hundreds of hand-drawn “key frames,” with software interpolating the in-between moments, or cheat by using expensive motion-capture systems to digitize the behavior of real actors.

As a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington in the early 2000s, Karen Liu set out to find an easier method. Her article of faith: “There [had] to be some way, from our knowledge of physics and biomechanics, to distill the properties that create motion styles.”

Biomechanics researchers had long been analyzing the mechanical factors that affect the way people move. Simulating those factors, Liu thought, would yield CG characters that move more naturally. But the human body contains hundreds of interacting parts, and it was impractical to measure or even stipulate the values of parameters such as tension and elasticity for every muscle, tendon, and ligament. Working with advisor Zoran Popovic, Liu eventually showed that feeding just a handful of these values into animation software is enough to reproduce a distinctive motion such as a “happy walk” in a range of CG models, from people to penguins.

To establish her style parameters, Liu developed algorithms based on a singl­e, simplifying assumption: that people naturally try to waste as little energy as possible when they move. Into these algorithms she feeds short segments of motion-capture data from subjects instructed to move in a certain way–to walk happily, for example. The software then reasons backward to guess the values of certain parameters, choosing those values that would have made the movements energy efficient.

Liu, who just joined the computer science faculty at Georgia Tech, is talking with major game makers and film studios about applying her algorithms to video games and animated films. She hopes the algorithms will help animators create CG humans that move more naturally than the robotically stiff characters in films like The Polar Express . “I think we’re really close,” she says.

Anna Lysyanskaya

Securing online privacy.

Problem: People want to use the Internet without having their habits documented or their personal data stolen. But they need to prove they’re authorized to access bank accounts or subscription sites, processes that usually involve revealing their identities.

Solution: Anna Lysyanskaya, an assistant professor of computer science, has developed a practical way for people to securely log in to websites without providing any identifying information. Her approach relies on “zero-knowledge proofs.” Say you want to browse a newspaper’s archives in total privacy. With zero-­knowledge proofs, you subscribe using a pseudo­nym and receive digitally signed credentials. When you access the paper’s site, your computer sends encrypted versions of the pseudonym and credentials. The archive can’t decrypt this information; instead, it tests it for characteristics that valid data must have. (A certain field has to contain a specific number of digits, for example.) If the credentials are fake, some attribute will be wrong, and the site will be able to tell.

Zero-knowledge proofs have been around for a while, but they’ve required too much computing power to be practical. Collaborating with Jan ­Camenisch of the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory, Lysyanskaya developed algorithms that make both generating and testing credentials much more efficient. IBM is incorporating these algorithms into its Idemix anonymous-credential systems.

Tapan Parikh

Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies.

When fishermen from the Indian state of Kerala are done fishing each day, they have to decide which of an array of ports they should sail for in order to sell their catch. Traditionally, the fishermen have made the decision at random–or, to put it more charitably, by instinct. Then they got mobile phones. That allowed them to call each port and discover where different fishes were poorly stocked, and therefore where they would be likely to get the best price for their goods. That helped the fishermen reap a profit, but it also meant that instead of one port’s being stuck with more fish than could be sold while other ports ran short, there was a better chance that supply would be closer to demand at all the ports. The fishermen became more productive, markets became more efficient, and the Keralan economy as a whole got stronger.

This story demonstrates an easily forgotten idea: relatively simple improvements in information and communication technologies can have a dramatic effect on the way businesses and markets work. That idea is central to the work of Tapan Parikh, a doctoral student in computer s­cience and the founder of a company called Ekgaon ­Technologies. Parikh has created information systems tailored for small-business people in the developing world–systems with the mobile phone, rather than the PC, at their core. His goal is to make it easier for these business owners to manage their own operations in an efficient and transparent way, and to build connections both with established financial institutions and with consumers in the developed world. This will help them–they’ll be able to get money to expand their operations and, ideally, find better prices for what they sell–and it should be a boon to development as well.

In the developing world, working with mobile phones has obvious advantages: they’re ubiquitous even in poorer countries (there are 185 million cell-phone subscribers in India and more than 200 million in Africa); they’re relatively affordable; and with the right software, they’re easy to use. So Parikh developed Cam (so called because the phone’s camera plays a key role in the user interface), a toolkit that makes it simple to use phones to capture images and scan documents, enter and process data, and run interactive audio and video. The Keralan fishermen had been able to improve their business simply by making phone calls. Cam would carry the process a step further, by taking advantage of modern phones’ computing capabilities.

Parikh’s most important project with Cam has focused on perhaps the trendiest field in economic development: microfinance, in which lending groups grant tiny loans–on the order of $25–to people in the developing world, usually to fund small-business ventures. (Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the best-known microfinance institution, the Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work in establishing the field.) The best-publicized version of microfinance involves a solo entrepreneur getting a small loan from a well-financed bank. But Parikh is collaborating with organizations that are more representative of the way it usually works. A big chunk of the microfinance business in India, for example, is conducted by self-help groups, in which 15 to 20 people (usually women) pool their capital and then meet weekly or monthly to make collective decisions about loans to members of the group. They also use their collective borrowing power to obtain loans from nongovernmental aid organizations or from financial institutions, and then lend that money to their members.

Parikh built a software system on top of Cam to assist self-help groups in managing their information and their operations. Unglamorously called SHG MIS (for “self-help group management and information system”), it includes a Cam-based application for entering and processing data, a text-messaging tool for uploading data to online databases, and a package of Web-based software for managing data and reporting it to any institution that has lent money to the self-help group. Such groups have traditionally relied on paper documentation, however, and because their members still trust paper, the software also includes a bar-code-based system. Loan applications, grants, receipts, and other documents are printed with identifying bar codes; the software enables the phone to scan the code, identify the document, photograph it, process the data it contains, and associate that data with the code. The result is a system that facilitates a quick and accurate flow of data from small villages to bigger cities, and vice versa.

In addition to providing a more efficient way for self-help groups to manage their finances, SHG MIS allows such groups to overcome two major challenges. First, it enables them to run their internal operations in a fair and transparent way, while ensuring that their loans make economic sense. “In these groups, things are often done in a somewhat ad hoc manner, using informal documentation,” Parikh says, “which can lead to instability and impermanence and contribute to the kinds of tensions that lead small groups to fall apart.” His software gives groups a more systematic method of documenting decisions, tracking financial performance over time, and collecting information on which kinds of loans work and which don’t. These advantages should help groups make better decisions and reduce internal political tensions.

The software could also improve the flow of information ­between self-help groups and the formal financial sector, which should enable them to get capital at better rates. As things stand right now, Parikh says, bankers’ interest in micro­finance is so high that the supply of capital more than meets demand. But because it’s difficult to track so many small, scattered loans, banks tend to offer the same deal to every business, regardless of performance, ability to repay, and so on. If self-help groups could document their performance in a formal, auditable system that banks could access quickly and reliably, the groups would be more likely to get fair prices. They would have access to more capital, too.

Two things are striking about Parikh’s invention. The first is how unremarkable it seems, and yet how consequential it is in practice. Parikh did not radically reimagine computing, nor did he make a major break with the way financial data is managed in the developed world. Instead, he focused on something whose benefits we take for granted–reliable, instant access to financial data–and figured out an easy, affordable way to bring it to people who need it. The second thing is that instead of forcing small-business people to discard all their old ways and embrace an entirely new paradigm, Parikh’s work attempts to meet them, as it were, where they live, in order to enhance their existing abilities and resources. Other engineers might insist that the self-help groups need to do away with paper, since it’s less efficient than simply using digital entry devices, or develop PC-­centered systems, since mobile phones (whatever their virtues) are limited in their power and capacity. Cam, though, relies on a different strategy, one that emerges from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top.

This strategy runs counter to the way computer science has traditionally been done. Many computer scientists tend to think more about making machines faster and more powerful than they do about making sure they meet people’s needs. What’s distinctive about Parikh’s approach is that he’s spent so much of the past seven years working not in front of a computer but in the field, talking with the people he hopes will eventually be his customers. It’s a way of life that seems more characteristic of an anthro­pologist than a coder, but it’s responsible for much of what Cam has become. In fact, Parikh says, “all of my ideas are really just rehashes of ideas that local people have come up with.”

Parikh has adopted the same approach in his work with fair-trade coffee farmers in Guatemala. In recent years, the “fair trade” and “organic” designations have come to have real economic value: fair-trade farmers are guaranteed a minimum price for their crop, and organic farmers can often charge higher prices. But these labels also cause problems. Because they’re one-size-fits-all, they reduce the incentive for farmers to improve their growing methods or the quality of their crops above the general minimum. And they create incentives for cheating, which in turn reduces the value of the label to consumers: are you really sure how that organic coffee you bought at Starbucks or Peet’s was grown? So Parikh devised a Cam system called Randi, for “representation and inspection tool.” It allows farm inspectors to use mobile phones to systematically photograph and document farms in order to ensure their compliance with quality and production standards, and to put that data online so that it’s easily found by certifying agencies, wholesalers, and consumers.

In other words, if you wanted to know how that organic coffee was grown and whether a fair price was paid for it, Randi would let you find out. In the long run, the system would allow today’s simple labels to become more nuanced, and in the process it would allow prices to more accurately reflect what consumers really value. “At the moment, prices are good at transmitting the value of goods in strict economic terms,” Parikh says. “But they’re not so good at transmitting other kinds of information, like what the production of a good has taken away from the environment, or the experience of the workers producing that good. One of the things technologies allow us to do is actually convey more of that information.”

It would be a mistake to see Cam and technologies like it as a panacea for the problem of underdevelopment. While it’s easy to become infatuated with the promise of microfinance and small-scale entrepreneurship, it’s also easy to overestimate how much influence these things can exert on developing economies, which often face structural problems that won’t be solved by making local markets more efficient. And it’s also the case that, in the short run at least, the arrival of new technologies can widen the gap between the prosperous and the struggling: if you’re buying more from the Cam-equipped farmers, you’ll probably buy less from the non-Cam-equipped ones. In other words, not everyone will win.

Parikh seems well aware of the limits of technology in general and Cam in particular. But he is also convinced that mobile phones have the capability to become far more powerful tools, which is why he has other applications in mind for Cam–such as tracking disease outbreaks and improving the coördination of relief after disasters. In each case, one can observe Parikh’s respect for the virtues of decentralized organization and the conviction that bringing more information and more transparency to social systems is better. Parikh is focused more on solving real problems than on developing complex technologies. “I think oftentimes with formal and well-established disciplines like computer s­cience, you run into the problem of inertia, a kind of hesitancy to accept new ideas about what should count as important,” he says. “But I’m cautiously optimistic that within academia as a whole, there’s a broad sense that the real-world impact of someone’s work is an important criterion by which to judge it. Ultimately, I think that’s what counts: how can the work we do have a practical impact? How can it make a difference in the way people live?”

Babak Parviz

Self-assembling micromachines.

Problem: Relatively simple microelectromechanical systems are already used in air bags and other devices, but MEMS of greater complexity hold promise in applications ranging from medical implants to advanced navigation devices. Such machines might include components like tiny sensors, motors, and power sources. The methods for manufacturing these diverse parts, however, are largely incompatible, which makes assembling complex MEMS on a large scale and at a reasonable cost impossible.

Solution: Babak Parviz, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, has developed a method of coaxing individual components to assemble themselves into MEMS devices. Recently, he used it to build a working single-crystal silicon circuit on a flexible plastic substrate; the two materials are difficult to combine using conventional manufacturing methods.

Parviz began by manufacturing micrometer­-size silicon parts in bulk. He also designed a plastic substrate with binding sites whose shapes complemented those of the silicon components. Parvi­z immersed the substrate in a fluid containing the silicon parts, which quickly attached to their binding sites. Metal interconnects embedded in the plastic completed the circuitry.

Such silicon-on-plastic devices could form the basis for flexible displays, biosensors, and low-cost solar panels. Parviz says that self-assemb­ly offers the ability to efficiently and cheaply manufacture multifunctional devices of all sizes from nanoscale components.

Partha Ranganathan

Power-aware computing systems.

Every year, computing devices–from cell phones to servers–consume at least 125 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly the amount produced by burning 350 million tons of coal. Partha Ranganathan, principal research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs, is developing strategies to bring that figure down (see below). “All the ideas are very intuitive,” he says. “But we needed to solve some hard problems to get there.” Technologies he helped develop, which could save money and lower greenhouse-gas emissions, are already starting to appear in consumer and business products.

Online social bookmarking.

In 2004, Kevin Rose set out to transform the way people read news. The result, Digg, mixes blogging, online syndication, social networking, and “crowdsourcing”–which combines the knowledge and opinions of many individuals–to create an online newspaper of stories selected by the masses. The principles behind Digg are simple. Users can submit stories; if other users like a story, they can “digg,” or praise, it; if not, they can “bury,” or condemn, it. A new visitor sees a ceaseless scroll of stories accompanied by a flurry of comments. Digg’s straightforward rules have made it hugely popular: less than three years after its launch, more than 17 million users visit the site each month. But with success, Digg has also attracted controversy. Some observers decry the inanity of the site’s top stories, and even habitual users admit that the comments are mostly puerile. Rose, who acts as the site’s chief architect, must increasingly weigh the anarchic free speech that characterized Digg’s early days against a more responsible approach to publishing that protects intellectual property and other institutional interests.

TR: Digg is a testament to collective wisdom–but I wonder if at any point you’ve felt embarrassed, either by the top stories or by the comments about the stories.

Kevin Rose: Not really. Every single day I find something that’s really interesting that I wouldn’t have found on a traditional news outlet, an interesting nugget of information that happens to surface on an unknown blog or a website that I haven’t heard of before. I think if you go on CNN.com or MSNBC.com, you’re going to find the news that you’re used to reading. When you come to Digg, you never know what you’re going to get.

TR: What about the common criticism of Digg, that what tends to be “dugg” is often superficial? Are the most popular stories on Digg really the best stories?

KR: As we speak, right now, the top three stories on Digg are do-it-yourself lucid dreaming, an update about the Apple iPhone, and why a former official of the Reagan administration thinks that President Bush should be tried as a war criminal. We get a mixture of all types of news on our front page.

TR: Stories appear and disappear on Digg’s main pages with tremendous speed. Does Digg move too quickly for most people to usefully understand what’s there?

KR: We try to make sure there isn’t too much information flowing through the system. We are constantly tweaking our promotion algorithm to make sure that it doesn’t become overwhelming. As we grow, we also have to continue to raise the bar required for stories to get promoted to the front page. One of the things that I’m really focused on is improving the experience that’s off the front page. Already you can get recommendations from friends; soon the system will start recommending stories that you might have missed or that you might find interesting, based on what you’ve dugg in the past.

TR: You had a small scandal recently, when you published the encryption key that protects high-definition video discs (HD-DVD). First, under industry pressure, you took down the post; then, under pressure from your users, you put it back. What is your policy on censorship?

KR: We sort of take everything on a case-by-case basis. Things that are very clear violations of our terms of service come off the site; we don’t allow pornography or pirated software, for instance. But when it’s in one of the gray areas, it gets tricky.

TR: I’m curious about your feelings about the power of the Digg community. Do you think it can be controlled or directed?

KR: It resists being directed, that’s for sure. It was very clear when the HD-DVD story broke, and then again, during the aftermath. I was watching the Digg community saying, “You can’t censor us; this is free speech.” The home page reflected those comments, and there was really nothing that we could do. We just built the platform. It’s really up to the users to determine what they want to see on the front page.

TR: You’re saying that even if you wanted to, you couldn’t control what appears on Digg–except by removing a story ex post facto.

KR: Yeah. Behind the scenes, what you don’t see is that we have these servers that are just going crazy. I mean, you have thousands and thousands of people digging stories and submitting stories and commenting and posting–and we can’t write code that would keep up with that. The HD-DVD business was absolutely fascinating. I sat there, and I was kind of in shock and spellbound at the same time. It was quite the evening.

TR: Digg watchers say that 100 users are respon­sible for more than half the stories on the site’s home page, a phenomenon that creates the potential for abuse. How do you know when someone is gaming Digg? And what can the company do to stop them?

KR: The system knows. Our main job is to evolve the platform so that it promotes to the front page news and videos that have a diverse crowd of people digging them. We have to make sure that when a story does make the front page, it was actually chosen by individuals who wanted to see it on the front page–and not spammers trying to promote their own stories.

Have you heard that media companies are ambivalent about the traffic Digg sends them? It’s hard to sell it to advertisers, because it’s unpredictable, and the quality of the audience isn’t measurable.

I think that’s probably true. But I find it a little hard to think of Digg as a source of traffic; it was designed as just a way for people to share things with their friends. Also, this trend is much bigger than us. If a story is ­popu­lar, it’s going to spread. We often see a chain reaction occur: a story will hit Del.icio.us, and then it’s on Digg, and then it’s on Boing Boing.

TR: To date, Digg has been a haven for science and technology geeks. Can you imagine a day when Digg will truly be a ­general-­interest site?

KR: Definitely. Politics is one of our most popular sections and will soon overtake technology. We started off with a large tech base; we were 100 percent technology for the first year, so that’s our roots. But we’re quickly expanding beyond that.

Marc Sciamanna

Controlling chaos in telecom lasers.

Problem: Vertical-cavity surface-­emitting lasers, or VCSELs, are commonly used in telecommunications networks, but they behave in ways scientists don’t completely understand. Specifically, the polarization of the light they emit–the orientation of its magnetic field–fluctuates unpredictably. Moreover, a little optical feedback, such as light reflected from network equipment, may result in chaotic changes in the power or wavelength of the light emitted by the lasers. Engineers would like to harness all of these fluctuations to increase the data-carrying capacity of light.

Solution: Marc Sciamanna, a professor at the École Supérieure d’Électricité in Paris, has developed a theoretical explanation of the lasers’ chaotic behavior. He has also suggested different techniques for controlling VCSEL polarization and chaotic laser dynamics in general; in particular, he demonstrated that optical feedback can be used to regularize polarization. More recently, he showed that increasing the amount of noise, or random fluctuation, in the electrical current that powers the lasers would make the variations in polarization more predictable and also stabilize the chaotic output. If light polarization and chaotic dynamics were subject to engineers’ control, they could be used to encode digital information–significantly expanding Internet bandwidth.

Teaching computers to read minds.

It’s not unusual to walk into Desney Tan’s Microsoft Research office and find him wearing a red and blue electroencephalography (EEG) cap, white wires cascading past his shoulders. Tan spends his days looking at a monitor, inspecting and modifying the mess of squiggles that approximate his brain’s electrical activity. He is using algorithms to sort through and make sense of EEG data in hopes of turning electrodes into meaningful input devices for computers, as common as the mouse and keyboard.

The payoff, he says, will be technology that improves productivity in the workplace, enhances video-game play, and simplifies interactions with computers. Ultimately, Tan hopes to develop a mass-market EEG system consisting of a small number of electrodes that, affixed to a person’s head, communicate wirelessly with software on a PC. The software could keep e-mail at bay if the user is concentrating, or select background music to suit different moods.

As early as 1929, researchers observed slight changes in EEG output that corresponded to mental exertion. But these results haven’t led to a mass-­market computer-input device, for a number of reasons. Most EEG experiments are conducted in labs where electrical “noise” has been minimized, but outside the lab, EEG is susceptible to electrical interference. EEG equipment also tends to be expensive. And previous research has averaged data from many users over long periods of time; some studies have shown that individual results vary widely.

Tan believes he can solve these problems by training machine-­learning algorithms–often used to understand speech and recognize photos–to account for variations between individuals’ EEG patterns and to distinguish interesting electrical signals from junk. Contrary to popular practice, Tan keeps his lab as electrically noisy as the average home or office. He is even using the least expensiv­e EEG equipment he could find–a kit he bought for a couple of hundred dollars at a New Age store. (Some people use EEG for meditation.)

Tan’s EEG cap has 32 electrodes that are affixed to the scalp with a conductive gel or paste. When neurons fire, they produce an electrical signal of a few millivolts. Electronics within the device record the voltage at each electrode, relative to the others, and send that data to a computer.

A subject using Tan’s system spends 10 to 20 minutes performing a series of tasks that require either high or low concentration–such as remembering letters or images for various amounts of time. EEG readings taken during the activity are fed to a computer, which manipulates them mathematically to generate thousands of derivations called “features.” The machine-­learning algorithm then sifts through the features, identifying patterns that reliably indicate the subject’s concentration level when the data was collected. Tan and his collaborators at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Carnegie Mellon University have shown that a winnowed set of about 30 features can predict a subject’s concentration level with 99 percent accuracy.

Tan expects the technology to be used initially as a controller for video games, since gamers are accustomed to “strapping on new devices,” he says. In fact, next year a company called Emotiv Systems, based in San Francisco, plans to offer an EEG product that controls certain aspects of video games. However, the company will not discuss the specifics of its technology, and there isn’t widespread consensus on the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.

The true challenge, Tan says, will be to make EEG interfaces simple enough for the masses. He and his team are working on minimizing the number of electrodes, finding a semisolid material as an alternative to the conductive gel, and developing wireless electrodes. A mass-market product could be many years away. But if Tan succeeds, getting a computer to read your thoughts could be as easy as putting on a Bluetooth headset.

Luis von Ahn

Using “captchas” to digitize books.

Luis von Ahn is a pioneer of “captchas”–those strings of distorted characters that websites force you to recognize and type in order to establish that you are a person and not a malevolent computer. But he finds the technology’s success a mixed blessing. “At first I was feeling quite proud of myself,” says von Ahn, a 2006 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who created captchas (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) for Yahoo in 2000 to thwart automated e-mail account registration, a tool of spammers. “But then I was feeling bad, because every time you solve a captcha, you waste 10 seconds.” People around the world solve an estimated 60 million captchas every day, adding up to more than 150,000 wasted hours.

Von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science, is a leader in using human skills to make computers work better. For example, he created an online game in which players identify elements in photographs; their answers help improve image-search algorithms. He’s now trying to put captchas to work in one of the epic efforts of the information age: digitizing millions of old books and making them searchable online.

An estimated 8 percent of words in these old books can’t be read by the optical character recognition (OCR) software used to scan them. Von Ahn has teamed with the nonprofit Internet Archive to use captchas to help interpret those words. After all, he says, “while you are solving a captcha, you are solving a task that computers can’t perform.” So he created a tool, called ­”recaptcha,” that pairs an unknown word with a known one. He distorts them both and puts a line through them–standard techniques for creating captchas. A user must decipher both captchas to access a site. The accurate typing of the known word serves the security purpose of captchas and adds a measure of confidence that the unknown word was identified correctly and can be used in place of the OCR’s gibberish. Volunteers have begun deploying recaptchas, and the technique has been used to decipher two million words for the Internet Archive’s book digitization effort. Recaptchas tap the joint power of people, networks, and computers in a way that should have a big impact, says Brewster Kahle, an Internet entre­preneur and cofounder of the archive: “It is like an army of ants building the Taj Mahal.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Power Is Unprecedented

It’s not just the extent of his influence—it’s the nature of it.

The Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes made a personal, riveting case for breaking up Facebook in a new essay published in The New York Times today. His argument hinges on the idea that Mark Zuckerberg is a “good, kind person” but one whose “power is unprecedented and un-American” and whose “influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.”

A major, if not the , reason to break up Facebook is that, as the philosopher Kanye West once put it: “ No one man should have all that power .” What makes the situation complicated, however, is that the type of power Mark Zuckerberg holds is what’s actually unprecedented.

In the terms of traditional power, Facebook and its CEO are not overwhelming by historical or contemporary standards. Militarily, of course, Facebook is a nonentity. Zuckerberg commands no world-class army, which ranks him significantly below Chinese, American, and Russian leaders. Politically, Zuckerberg has no base, and despite being very famous , is quite unpopular . Culturally, Zuckerberg does not have the mystique of Steve Jobs, nor has his philanthropy turned him into a wise nobleman like Bill Gates ( not yet, anyway ). Financially, his personal fortune is among the world’s top 10 , but there are a lot of other billionaires with comparable fortunes, from the space enthusiast Jeff Bezos to the many children of very successful businesspeople.

Read: Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough

Even Zuckerberg’s company, measured by traditional means, is merely strong. Facebook is not among the top 75 revenue-generating companies . It has roughly as many employees as the Arizona mining company Freeport-McMoran and the steelmaker Nucor, or roughly 0.01 percent as many as Walmart. Facebook’s profits land it in the top 15 companies, and its market value is in the top 10 on its perceived potential for growth. Taken as a whole in the context of the global economy, Facebook looks like a very profitable, high-potential company, but it does not stand out on any one metric. (The Saudi oil company Aramco, for example, generated $224 billion in profits in 2018 .)

But few companies are as tightly controlled by one person as Facebook is. The company came of age during an era of Silicon Valley in which founders retained remarkable control over their enterprises. By creating different classes of shares with different voting power, Zuckerberg has retained operational control while still selling shares of his company. “Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares ,” Hughes notes in the essay. Even the Ford family, which famously created an unusual dual-class share structure in the 1930s , only holds 40 percent voting control of the company. When it comes to Walmart, another unusually closely held operation , the Walton family owns fewer than 50 percent. And these are families, with their own conflicts and competing interests. Zuckerberg is both the chief executive and holds the majority of voting shares. There is no institutional check on Zuckerberg.

Yet his power is great. Hughes is correct that we’ve never seen anything like it. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—three of the five most popular communication tools on the planet, alongside Alphabet’s YouTube and Tencent’s WeChat. In many countries, Zuckerberg’s products are the internet . They are the media for information dispersal—like a newspaper or television channel—as well as for peer-to-peer communications, like an old-school telecom network. They are also a crucial ligature for small businesses, as internet home, customer-service desk, and advertising platform, and for direct sales through tools such as Facebook Marketplace.

Who is Zuckerberg like? The best parallels might be the newspaper barons, such as William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch. But it’s more like if all three broadcast-television networks of the 20th century were owned by the same person, in one corporation that he completely controlled, and that also was the central venue for political speech and finding an electrician. Or maybe, as we’ve argued, he’ll be this generation’s Bob Moses , who, in his quest to remake New York, first acquired power through building, and then by any means necessary.

As Max Read has pointed out , no one can quite figure out what Facebook is, and by extension, no one really knows what Zuckerberg’s power could do. While Zuckerberg has been driven to dominate his corporate rivals, he has yet to use the power that he holds to do anything other than compete (that we know of, at least).

Read: Facebook uses still don’t know how Facebook works

What could an evil Zuckerberg do?

Because Facebook Inc. has developed the most sophisticated tools for predicting human behavior that the world has ever seen, and because its user bases are the largest in the world, the company could exert more persuasive power over more people than has ever been possible.

Facebook gets people to use its products, and it uses the actions that people take to manufacture more useful data about their tendencies, as Shoshana Zuboff has laid out in her book Surveillance Capitalism . That is to say, all the things we control about interactions with the empire—the friends we have, the photos we post, the text we write—are not the information that Facebook is after. These are the raw material for the machine-learning processes that generate Facebook’s real power: their ability to forecast what you’ll do when faced with a set of choices.

And that power is growing with both the data in the system and the development of the artificial intelligences that feed on it.

Even if Mark Zuckerberg has never used this power for anything other than getting me to buy sneakers, it probably is not a great idea for one person to have so much predictive capacity about the citizens of the world. That Zuckerberg has not done so might be the best argument for breaking up Facebook now —because it’s not too late.

Breaking up the company probably would not (immediately) solve the problems we’ve come to associate with the internet. Who knows, it could even exacerbate them. But it would take one major, underappreciated risk out of the future: that Mark Zuckerberg decides to wield the tremendous power he has so far eschewed.

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Mark Zuckerberg

Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. He is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company.

In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse — moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.

Mark is also the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) with his wife Priscilla. They founded CZI in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities. Through collaboration, providing resources and building technology, CZI’s mission is to help build a more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.

Mark was born in White Plains, New York. He studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California in 2004.

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More From Mark Zuckerberg

“We’re a company where everyone here wakes up in the morning and thinks about how we’re going to help people connect and communicate.” ( Interview with The Verge, Oct. 2022 )

“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We’ll be able to feel present, like we’re right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are. We’ll be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways and that’s going to unlock a lot of amazing new experiences.” ( Meta Connect 2021 )

“If you look at the history of science, most big advances are preceded by new tools to observe things.” ( Forbes, March 2023 )

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How Mark Zuckerberg Changed the Culture of Harvard Forever

The most ambitious Harvard students now aspire to startups, not stability.

Largely thanks to his influence, the graduates Zuckerberg will address next week have different ambitions than his former classmates. Whereas the Harvard class of 2006 made a beeline for Wall Street, a quarter of this year’s working graduates will start their professional lives in Silicon Valley as coders, engineers, or entrepreneurs.

.css-4rnr1w:before{margin:0 auto 1.875rem;width:60%;height:0.125rem;content:'';display:block;background-color:#9a0500;color:#fff;} .css-gcw71x{color:#030929;font-family:NewParis,NewParis-fallback,NewParis-roboto,NewParis-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.625rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.8125rem;line-height:1.1;}}.css-gcw71x b,.css-gcw71x strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-gcw71x em,.css-gcw71x i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} Whenever I mention my friend is taking a semester off, people ask if it’s because he or she is starting a company.

My freshman year in 2014 marked the first time Harvard’s flagship computer science course, CS50, surpassed the Wall Street feeder Economics 10a as the class with the highest enrollment. This is partly because six-figure starting salaries at Google and Microsoft now compete with those at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. It’s also because many students dream of founding a company like Facebook and see computer science as the way to get there.

“The image of Zuck is what Harvard computer science students interested in starting their own company rally around,” said Tomas Reimers, a senior who will start a job at Facebook as a software engineer after graduation. “There are many founders who came out of Harvard, but no discussion is complete without Facebook.”

In the aftermath of Zuckerberg’s meteoric rise, Harvard invested heavily in student entrepreneurship. The Harvard Innovation Lab, or i-Lab, has launched dozens of student startups since its founding in 2011, the year Facebook broke one trillion page views per month.

“Now there’s this whole culture of people who know the same kind of thing is possible,” said rising junior Athena Kan, a computer science major interning this summer as a software engineer at Uber. “The i-Lab started, at least in part, because of Zuckerberg; the Thiel fellowship started up, in part, because of him,” she explained, referring to the program begun by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel that gives student entrepreneurs $100,000 to drop out of college to focus on their startups.

“Whenever I mention my friend is taking a semester off, people ask if it’s because he or she is starting a company,” Kan added.

Thiel is not the only venture capitalist chasing the potential of student entrepreneurs. First Round Capital, an early Uber investor, created the Dorm Room Fund as a venture group run by students to invest in student startups. They were soon followed by General Catalyst, which finances a similar fund called Rough Draft Ventures. (Full disclosure: Kan and I are investment partners at DRF; Reimers is the outgoing managing partner of RDV.)

“DRF and RDV started up because it became a possibility that the best founders can come from college," Kan said. “Bill Gates was no longer as much of an anomaly.”

Rising junior Jenny Wang, also a computer science major, agreed. Wang is working this summer as an engineering fellow at the food delivery startup DoorDash, through a program organized by the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.

Of my seven roommates, four of us have started companies.

“Post-Zuckerberg Harvard aims to build one of the largest communities of university entrepreneurs by funneling significant resources to support the growing ecosystem of student founders,” she said. “It's an ecosystem of young innovators who do not set out to explicitly unseat the incumbents, but rather seek to solve a difficult problem in their own way, much like Zuckerberg built Facebook to suit his own millennial needs.”

My own housing group embodies the broader proliferation of student entrepreneurship: out of seven roommates, four of us have started companies.

One roommate, Sam Koppelman, founded the education startup Quixaro our freshman year. That summer, he teamed up with six coders to work out of an office in Manhattan and scored funding from three collegiate startup accelerators.

“Mark Zuckerberg has caused almost as many Harvard students to launch startups as he has encouraged them to hit up Pinocchio's Pizza,” Koppelman said, referencing Zuckerberg’s favorite college dining spot. “And Harvard kids eat a lot of fucking pizza.”

After signing up several hundred users, Koppelman stopped work on Quixaro and left Harvard to become the youngest digital strategist on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He returned to school this semester, taking extra classes to graduate on time.

Another roommate, Joe Kahn , founded Slide our freshman year to make it easier for people to transfer personal data to organizations like banks, schools, and hospitals. He incorporated and received funding from Dorm Room Fund before running into insurmountable operational hurdles. After returning the money to DRF, he joined the group as an investor and became managing partner last fall.

There’s a lot of pressure for students in tech to start their own company.

“There’s a lot of pressure for students in tech to start their own company,” he said, which he feels is a mixed blessing. His advice? “In and amongst the noise it’s easy to end up starting a company for the sake of starting a company. Don’t do that. Work on problems that you’re passionate about and seek out ways to make a meaningful impact. That may or may not be through a startup of your own.”

Claudia Laurie, who founded the collegiate fashion company Bell Apparel , leveraged fluent Mandarin to score favorable terms with Chinese suppliers. “I had always been interested in the fashion industry but wanted real hands-on experience with building a brand and shipping a product from beginning to end,” she said. “Only in college does one get complete access and understanding of the student market, so I thought that it was the right place to start.”

“I also saw a need for more fashionable college apparel,” Laurie says with a laugh.

Her first product, a charcoal gray jacket emblazoned with a Harvard-esque insignia, did well on campus and quickly grew to more than a thousand monthly sales in China. “Internships didn’t fulfill the experience and learning I wanted the same way starting from scratch would,” she said. During the launch, boxes of Bell Jackets filled her room and overflowed into our corridor.

Inspired by my roommates and Zuckerberg’s lasting legacy, I set out last year to start my own company, General Biotechnologies , which now has a novel cancer therapy in preclinical trials.

Working with partners at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, our team joined the i-Lab’s startup incubator and a series of competitions to fund R&D and patent filings. Meanwhile, my girlfriend Emilia Gonzalez—who also works out of the i-Lab incubator—began building Checkmate, a gamified glucose monitor for people with diabetes.

All of our projects, in biotech, education, personal data, fashion, and healthcare, were inspired and enabled by the trailblazing success of past student entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg.

“Mark showed us that if you think you can solve a problem and you’re excited about it, the wrong thing to do is wait,” said Rohan Pavuluri, my freshman-year roommate and founder of Upsolve , which he describes as “Turbotax for bankruptcy.”

Like Koppelman, Pavuluri dropped out of Harvard our junior fall having won money to work on Upsolve. He returned this semester, wagering that Harvard’s on-campus support for student entrepreneurship would accelerate his progress. The bet paid off: earlier this month he won $75,000 in the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge.

Mark showed us that if you think you can solve a problem and you’re excited about it, the wrong thing to do is wait.

“If a 20-year old can create one of the most valuable companies in the world, getting an entry-level job at a prestigious Wall Street firm is an accomplishment that pales in comparison,” he said, having just turned down an internship in venture capital to pursue Upsolve full-time.

Not that any of this is easy. Many student entrepreneurs experience initial success—a bug-free launch, user acquisition, angel investment—and envision stepping out of Harvard directly into their own venture-backed company. Then they run into technical challenges, stagnant growth, co-founder drama, or any number of other roadblocks that lie between aspiration and Fortune 500. It’s impossible to pin down an exact statistic, but everyone agrees the vast majority of student startups fail.

Jared Pochtar, who graduates this week, is intent on not seeing that happen to his startup Pagedraw , which makes tools for software engineers. Pochtar and his co-founder Gabriel Guimaraes raised $1.2 million last year from a group of venture capitalists, the co-founder of Quora, and the football legend Joe Montana. Unlike Zuckerberg, Pochtar and Guimaraes decided to finish college while they used the funding to build out their product and recruit a team.

“At Harvard, the legacy of Zuckerberg is something we all look to as an example of what students here can do,” said Pochtar. “Starting a company is a very risky venture, and the way that VCs think is that you have to have a shot at being a billion-dollar company or they won’t invest. The system is set-up so that if you’re not a billion-dollar company, you’re a failure.”

“I believe my company is a billion-dollar company,” he added.

Pochtar thinks that despite the risk, now is actually the safest time to start a company. “It’s more de-risked than ever; it feels like a safer career choice than before. That’s because there’s a higher expectation of failure—even if the company as a whole isn’t successful, there’s a million reasons why it might not work out. But if you do great technical work, you’ll have other opportunities and be in a more advanced role than if you had just gone to one of the big companies.”

Pochtar gives credit for his ability to launch Pagedraw to a combination of mentors and the resources that have become available to student entrepreneurs. The summer before senior year, while peers flocked to internships at tech firms or more conventional gigs in finance or consulting, Pochtar and Guimaraes joined a startup fellowship hosted by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which became one of Pagedraw’s first investors.

He attributes these opportunities to Zuckerberg. “It’s hard to overstate the impact of such a young entrepreneur succeeding. Before Zuckerberg, you needed to have years and years of experience to start a company. His biggest influence is how it’s become looked on favorably to be young in this industry. Young tech people are now expected to start companies.”

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Reclassifying: Why Students Are Repeating Years

Have College Admissions Returned to Normal Crazy?

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Etiquette 101: Sharing College Acceptance News

How'd Vanderbilt Get So Hot?

How St Andrews Became a Top American School

Harvard-Westlake's Battle on the Back Nine

Mark Zuckerberg

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How Private Money From Facebook's CEO Saved The 2020 Election

Sabby Robinson

Gracie Stockton

Detroit election workers count absentee ballots for the 2020 general election at TCF Center on Nov. 4. Election offices around the U.S. say they couldn't have carried out this year's challenging election without help from a nonprofit tied to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Detroit election workers count absentee ballots for the 2020 general election at TCF Center on Nov. 4. Election offices around the U.S. say they couldn't have carried out this year's challenging election without help from a nonprofit tied to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Bill Turner knew he had a tough job. He took over as acting director of voter services in Chester County, Pa., in September, just two months before a divisive presidential election amid a pandemic. Huge voter turnout was expected, and COVID-19 required election managers like Turner to handle mail-in ballots on a scale they'd never seen and confront the threat of their staffers becoming sick.

These challenges had forced many election offices to burn through their budgets months earlier. Turner had previously served as the county's emergency manager, experience that seemed apt for overseeing an election that many observers feared would become a catastrophe.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, and Priscilla Chan, his wife, donated $350 million to a nonprofit that gave grants to election officials around the United States. Ian Tuttle/Getty Images hide caption

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, and Priscilla Chan, his wife, donated $350 million to a nonprofit that gave grants to election officials around the United States.

With a tight budget and little help from the federal government, Chester County applied for an election grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a previously small Chicago-based nonprofit that quickly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to help local election offices — most notably, $350 million from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

"Honestly, I don't know what we would have done without it," Turner said.

The coronavirus pandemic — and Congress' neglect — necessitated an unprecedented bailout of election offices with private money funneled through the little-known nonprofit. And the money proved indispensable.

Turner is one of 25 election directors from swing states interviewed by APM Reports who said the grant money was essential to preventing an election meltdown amid worries over a pandemic and a president who continues to openly question — without evidence — the legitimacy of the process.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life gave grants to more than 2,500 jurisdictions this year to help departments pay for election administration. The money arrived as historically underfunded election department budgets were sapped from unforeseen purchases during the primaries and were forced to spend money on election workers, postage and printing for the increasing number of voters who wanted to vote by mail.

The nonprofit gave Chester County $2.5 million for the election, which is more than the county's 2020 budget for voting services.

Chester County is one of several large suburban counties that ring Philadelphia — once-Republican strongholds that have shifted in Democrats' favor in recent years. Pennsylvania was pivotal to Joe Biden's victory over President Trump, and his win in the state was fueled in part by his success in Chester County. He won it by 17 percentage points — nearly double Hillary Clinton's margin four years earlier.

Turner used the grant to buy 14 drop boxes for ballots, pay staff to watch those sites and purchase body cameras that recorded employees collecting ballots from the drop boxes. He also spent a large portion of the grant on additional equipment and people to ensure that ballots were mailed out and counted quickly. The county processed 150,000 mail ballots for the November election in 36 hours. Without the new equipment and personnel, he said, it would have taken a week or longer.

"This grant really was a lifesaver in allowing us to do more, efficiently and expeditiously," he said. "It probably would have taken a very long time if we didn't have the resources to do this."

Election precinct cases containing ballots, election materials and keys to voting machines are held under guard by the Allegheny County Police at the Allegheny County elections warehouse on Nov. 4 in Pittsburgh. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images hide caption

Election precinct cases containing ballots, election materials and keys to voting machines are held under guard by the Allegheny County Police at the Allegheny County elections warehouse on Nov. 4 in Pittsburgh.

The private money was needed in part because the federal government hadn't provided enough funding. Congress allocated $400 million in March for election services, but that was just a tenth of what some officials said was needed.

"Despite election officials basically begging our federal government for assistance, that money never came through," said Liz Howard, with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. "Congress really failed our election officials."

With little action from Congress, the private sector, led by Zuckerberg and Chan, stepped up. The couple awarded $400 million to nonprofits for election assistance — with most of it going to the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

The full extent of the grants isn't known. The Center for Tech and Civic Life declined repeated interview requests from APM Reports to discuss the funding and how it was used. In late October, the group listed the jurisdictions that received funding on its website but didn't disclose dollar amounts or funding priorities for each jurisdiction.

But through a series of interviews, public records requests and a review of public meetings, APM Reports pieced together the details of grant awards in the five swing states that decided the election. APM Reports obtained more than 30 applications and grant agreements between local election offices and the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The documents show requests mainly focused on the logistics of the election: increased pay for poll workers, expanded early voting sites and extra equipment to more quickly process millions of mailed ballots.

Some jurisdictions received grants that were a small fraction of their election budgets, while others saw theirs increase several times over. Suddenly, election administrators who had had to scrounge for resources could "fund their dream election," according to Howard.

In the weeks since the election, allies of Trump have included the Center for Tech and Civic Life's grants in their voter fraud conspiracy theories. They have challenged the legality and neutrality of the grants, claiming that the funding was aimed at boosting Democratic turnout.

But an APM Reports analysis of voter registration and voter turnout in three of the five key swing states shows the grant funding had no clear impact on who turned out to vote. Turnout increased across the U.S. from 2016. The APM Reports analysis found that counties in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona that received grants didn't have consistently higher turnout rates than those that didn't receive money.

An election worker scans mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department on Oct. 20 in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Ethan Miller/Getty Images hide caption

An election worker scans mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department on Oct. 20 in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Officials with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and government officials have defended themselves in court and in written statements by saying the goal was to ensure safe voting options during the pandemic.

"In this moment of need, we feel so fortunate to be administering an open-call grant program available to every local election department in every state in the union to ensure that they have the staffing, training, and equipment necessary so that this November every eligible voter can participate in a safe and timely way and have their vote counted," the Center for Tech and Civic Life said in a statement on Sept. 24.

The nonprofit is also continuing to offer grants to communities that are holding runoff elections in Georgia in January.

While some election officials see little difference between private and government funding for elections, other officials are deeply worried about the precedent that the private grants may set. They say private donors could have a personal agenda. For example, Zuckerberg may have wanted to improve his public image after years of criticism that the misinformation and divisive rhetoric on Facebook have damaged democracies around the world.

"It's really important that it's a one-time thing," said Rachael Cobb, associate professor of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University in Boston. Cobb said the private money was critical for election administration this year, "but over time, it in and of itself is corrosive." She said continuing to use private money for such purposes "sullies [the election] in a way that we don't need it to be sullied at all."

But other election analysts say private funding is the best option if the federal government isn't going to commit to sustainable long-term funding for election offices.

They also say the grants helped avert a potential disaster where long lines, missing mail and slow counting could have led Trump to further question the integrity of results in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.

David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that without the grants, "it certainly would have taken them a lot longer to process and count those absentee ballots, which would have only made this post-election period more unbearable."

For more, read the full story at APM Reports .

Editor's Note: Facebook is among NPR's financial supporters.

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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be the principal speaker at the Afternoon Program, sharing Harvard’s 366th Commencement Day spotlight with a host of honorees at the top of their fields.

Mark Zuckerberg , Doctor of Laws

Mark Zuckerberg , who founded Facebook in 2004, is the featured speaker at the Afternoon Program of Harvard’s 366th Commencement. Zuckerberg is Facebook’s chairman and CEO. In 2010, Time magazine named him Person of the Year and Vanity Fair magazine listed him among its “top 100 most influential people of the information age.” In 2016, Forbes magazine named him among its 10 “World’s Most Powerful People.”

Zuckerberg has also emerged as a major philanthropist, having pledged to direct tens of billions of dollars to a range of causes. Over their lifetimes, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician and 2007 Harvard College graduate, have pledged to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which is committed to advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity. Zuckerberg studied computer science at Harvard University before moving Facebook to Palo Alto, Calif.

Norman R. Augustine , Doctor of Laws

Norman Augustine is the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp. and has held numerous positions in the aerospace industry and government, including assistant director of defense research and engineering in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and under secretary and acting secretary of the Army.

He was chairman of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Red Cross, and the Aerospace Industries Association, and was a 16-year member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Augustine has been presented with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by the president of the United States, received the Joint Chiefs of Staff Distinguished Public Service Award, and five times received the Department of Defense’s highest civilian decoration, the Distinguished Service Medal.

Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe , Doctor of Laws

Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe is a Somali human rights activist and physician. As Somalia’s first female gynecologist, she opened a one-room clinic in 1983 to help meet the needs of pregnant women in the area. As the Somalia civil war began in 1991 and refugees flocked to her, her efforts expanded and she founded what is now the Hawa Abdi Foundation (DHAF). Today, the DHAF includes a hospital, school, and feeding center, and offers education, health care, shelter, and training to an estimated 90,000 displaced people, mostly women and children.

Abdi has won numerous distinctions and awards, including the John Jay Justice Award, Vital Voices’ Woman of the Year Award, and a nomination for the Noble Peace Prize in 2012.

Dame Judi Dench , Doctor of Arts

Dame Judi Dench is a celebrated actress who has garnered wide popular and critical admiration for a career marked by outstanding performances in both classical and contemporary roles.

Over her 60-year career, she has been revered for her work in television, film, and on stage. Dench gained international recognition for her legendary role as M in seven James Bond films.

Dench has won numerous major awards, including an Academy Award, 10 BAFTA Awards, eight Laurence Olivier Awards, and a Tony Award for Best Actress. In recognition of her many achievements she received an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1970, became a Dame of the British Empire in 1988, and in 2005 was awarded a Companion of Honour.

Sandra M. Gilbert , Doctor of Laws

Sandra Gilbert is a distinguished professor emerita of English at the University of California, Davis. A leading feminist literary critic and author of eight collections of poetry, Gilbert is well known for her work with scholar Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored several works.

Gilbert has taught at Indiana University, Princeton University, and University of California, Davis, among others, and was the first M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University. She has served as president of the Modern Language Association and is a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, Gilbert was named a co-winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Lifetime Achievement.

James Earl Jones , Doctor of Arts

James Earl Jones is an acclaimed actor who has performed on stage, television, and in films. Most notably, Jones’ voice is known as Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in Disney’s “The Lion King.”

Since his Broadway debut in 1957, Jones has won numerous and distinguished awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center Honors, and two Tony Awards . In 2011, the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him with an honorary Oscar. Jones also was awarded a Lifetime Achievement honor at the 2017 Tony Awards.

In 2004, Jones was recognized with the Harvard Foundation Humanitarian Award. Earlier this year, Jones starred in the American Repertory Theater’s “Night of the Iguana” at Harvard.

Walter E. Massey , Doctor of Laws Walter Massey is chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), having previously served as its president.

Prior to his roles at SAIC, Massey was president of Morehouse College for more than a decade. Morehouse College is also his alma mater. Massey has served at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Brown University, and in the University of California system. From 1991 to 1993, he was the director of the National Science Foundation under President George H.W. Bush.

Throughout his career, Massey has served on the boards of the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, Smithsonian Institution, and a number of other organizations committed to the advancement of science and technology, diversity in education, and the arts and culture.

Massey holds honorary degrees from 39 universities, and is also a trustee emeritus of the University of Chicago and Brown University.

Michael Rabin , Doctor of Science

Michael Rabin is the Thomas J. Watson Sr. Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and helped shape the field of theoretical computer science. Rabin actively contributes to major problems of encryption, privacy, and internet security.

Prior to joining the Harvard University faculty in 1981, Rabin served as the H.B. Fine Instructor in Mathematics and member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton before joining the mathematics department at Hebrew University.

Rabin is member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the French Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society.

Rabin’s prizes include the Turing Award in Computer Science, the Dan David Prize, the Israel Prize, the EMET Prize, and the Rothschild Prize.

John Williams , Doctor of Music

John Williams is one of America’s most accomplished and successful composers for film and the concert stage.

His 40-year artistic partnership with director Steven Spielberg has resulted in many of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and successful films, including all seven “Star Wars” films and the first three “Harry Potter” films.

In addition to his work in film and television, Williams has composed numerous works for the concert stage and served as music director and laureate conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980-1993.

As one of the nation’s most distinguished and contributive musical voices, Williams has received a variety of prestigious awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors, the Olympic Order, and numerous Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Emmy Awards, and Golden Globe Awards. In 2016, Williams received the 44th Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute — the first composer to receive this honor.

Huda Y. Zoghbi , Doctor of Science

Huda Zoghbi is a professor in the departments of pediatrics, molecular and human genetics, neurology, and neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. She is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the founding director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital.

Zoghbi’s discoveries have unraveled the genetic underpinnings of a number of neurological disorders. She has provided new ways of thinking about common neurological disorders, including autism and Parkinson’s disease, that could lead to better treatments.

Among Zoghbi’s many recognitions are the 2017 Canada Gairdner International Award and 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Neurodegeneration.

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By Guthrie Scrimgeour

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound

Off the two-lane highway that winds along the northeast side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, on a quiet stretch of ranchland between the tourist hubs of Kapaa and Hanalei, an enormous, secret construction project is underway.

A 6-foot wall blocks the view from a nearby road fronting the project, where cars slow to try to catch a glimpse of what’s behind it. Security guards stand watch at an entrance gate and patrol the surrounding beaches on ATVs. Pickup trucks roll in and out, hauling building materials and transporting hundreds of workers.

Nobody working on this project is allowed to talk about what they’re building. Almost anyone who passes compound security—from carpenters to electricians to painters to security guards—is bound by a strict nondisclosure agreement , according to several workers involved in the project. And, they say, these agreements aren’t a formality. Multiple workers claim they saw or heard about colleagues removed from the project for posting about it on social media. Different construction crews within the site are assigned to separate projects and workers are forbidden from speaking with other crews about their work, sources say.

“It’s fight club. We don’t talk about fight club,” says David, one former contract employee. WIRED has agreed to withhold his real name because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “Anything posted from here, they get wind of it right away.”

Another former site worker, who we will call John, says he was told that another member of his construction company was fired for allegedly sharing a picture of the project on Snapchat. He’s heard similar stories from other crews. John says the “very strict” enforcement of NDAs has made workers on-site unwilling to “take the chance to get caught even taking a picture.”

The project is so huge that a not-insignificant share of the island is bound by the NDA. But everyone here knows who is behind it. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta , who bought the land in a series of deals beginning in August 2014 .

Interviews with several people associated with the project, along with public records and court documents seen by WIRED, suggest that since then, the planning and construction of the roughly 1,400-acre compound has been shrouded in secrecy. The property, known as Koolau Ranch, will, according to planning documents, include a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, have its own energy and food supplies, and, when coupled with land purchase prices, will cost in excess of $270 million. According to evidence reviewed by WIRED, the project has relied on legal maneuvering and political networking, and at times, sources believe, it has shown disregard for the local public. All the while, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan continue to build one of the most expensive properties in the world.

Jason Parham

Matt Burgess

Nena Farrell

The oldest and smallest of the four main Hawaiian Islands, Kauai is a tight-knit community of about 73,000 people. Its residents are the descendants of Native Hawaiians, along with Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Puerto Rican migrants who came to work the sugarcane plantations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the more recent arrivals come from the US mainland and other Pacific islands. When plantation owners moved their operations overseas in search of cheaper labor, the island’s sugarcane economy was replaced by tourism. Workers on the Zuckerberg site are part of a growing construction industry focused on luxury home builds for mainlanders looking to move to paradise.

Though tourist-centric development has transformed much of the island in recent decades, Kauai maintains a small-town feel. Older residents still remember a time when there was only one traffic light —the second was installed in 1973. Wild chickens and feral cats are everywhere. Locals surf and fish off the beaches, or hunt pigs in the mountains. People know their neighbors.

With NDAs forbidding workers from discussing the project, the secluded North Shore compound has gained a mythic status on Kauai. One local architect unaffiliated with the Zuckerberg project jokes that it reminds him of medieval rulers who, according to legend, killed the architects of their most ambitious projects so the secrets of their designs would die with them.

Tall tales about the compound and its owner run rampant on the local rumor mill—known colloquially as the “coconut wireless.” One person heard that Zuckerberg was building a vast underground city. Many people speculate that the site will become some sort of postapocalyptic bunker in case of civilization collapse. What’s being built doesn’t live up to the coconut wireless chatter, but it’s close. Detailed planning documents obtained by WIRED through a series of public record requests show the makings of an opulent techno-Xanadu, complete with underground shelter and what appears to be a blast-resistant door.

According to plans viewed by WIRED and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total. It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field (57,000 square feet), which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen.

In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses are planned, which will be connected by intricate rope bridges, allowing visitors to cross from one building to the next while staying among the treetops. A building on the other side of the main mansions will include a full-size gym, pools, sauna, hot tub, cold plunge, and tennis court. The property is dotted with other guest houses and operations buildings. The scale of the project suggests that it will be more than a personal vacation home — Zuckerberg has already hosted two corporate events at the compound.

The plans show that the two central mansions will be joined by a tunnel that branches off into a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, featuring living space, a mechanical room, and an escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder. “There’s cameras everywhere,” David says—and the documents back this up. More than 20 cameras are included on plans for one smaller ranch operations building alone. Many of the compound’s doors are planned to be keypad-operated or soundproofed. Others, like those in the library, are described as “blind doors,” made to imitate the design of the surrounding walls. The door in the underground shelter will be constructed out of metal and filled in with concrete—a style common in bunkers and bomb shelters.

According to sources and planning documents reviewed by WIRED, the compound will be self-sufficient, with its own water tank, 55 feet in diameter and 18 feet tall—along with a pump system. A variety of food is already produced across its 1,400 acres through ranching and agriculture. Brandi Hoffine Barr, spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, declined to comment on the size or bunker-like qualities of the project.

The cost rivals that of the largest private, personal construction projects in human history. Building permits put the price tag for the main construction at around $100 million, in addition to $170 million in land purchases, but this is likely an underestimate. Building costs on the remote island are still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

That price for a private residence is unparalleled in the local construction industry—as is the level of secrecy and security. “The only other time you see that is when you’re doing secure military installations,” says one local construction industry official affiliated with the site. “For a private project to have an NDA attached to it is very rare.”

With such scale and complexity come workplace accidents. In February, for instance, a crane traveling down a steep, narrow road on the property fell off an edge— careening down a hill with the operator inside. The driver, a 53-year-old Kauai local, suffered serious injuries and was transported to the hospital in stable condition. He has since returned to the site, Hoffine Barr tells WIRED.

In August 2019, 70-year-old security guard Rodney Medeiros, who was under an NDA that, from what his family understood, prevented him from discussing specific details about his job, ended a 12-hour shift standing watch at a beach by the property. He was a contracted worker and was only hired when Zuckerberg was visiting—which he was that weekend, according to court documents reviewed by WIRED. These documents, later filed on behalf of Medeiros’ children, claim that rainy conditions made it impossible for an ATV to pick him up, as was standard practice. Medeiros began making his way up a steep trail to reach the compound’s exit, and midway up the path he suffered a heart attack. He was transported to a hospital, where he died hours later.

The secrecy of the compound was evident in the wake of Medeiros’ death. A recorded conversation between three of his children and a compound security manager, Hank Barriga, a week after his death, hints at what their legal team has implied in their wrongful death suit against one of Zuckerberg’s LLCs. The filing alleges that there is an effort behind the scenes of the Zuckerberg project to control the flow of information. In the recording, Medeiros’ children express frustration that in the days after their father’s heart attack they weren’t provided any details about what happened. Barriga says that he wanted to talk with the family but was blocked from doing so. “I was told to just wait, you know, all the supervisors want to talk to each other,” he says. Another contracted worker, a longtime roommate and close friend of Medeiros, said in a court deposition that he had also felt reluctant to discuss the incident because of his NDA. Hoffine Barr declined to comment on the recording due to the ongoing litigation.

According to Allan Parachini, a local journalist, the focus on managing the flow of information around the compound has included reprimanding the local press for critical coverage. Throughout 2017, Parachini had been requesting permits in an effort to learn what Zuckerberg was building on Kauai. He’d also recently written an opinion piece in the local newspaper, The Garden Island , that was critical of Zuckerberg, ending with a call for residents to “tell Zuckerberg that abusing his stewardship of public beaches as if we are just another batch of Facebook victims is unacceptable.”

After the article was published, Parachini claims, a local Zuckerberg representative informed him that their team would not communicate with him for any future pieces. This ban extended beyond the professional world. Parachini also volunteered with a marine mammal rescue program, which on one occasion in 2017 needed to cross Zuckerberg’s land to quickly reach a distressed seal on the beach next to the property. After crossing the compound, he claims he was informed that he, specifically, would no longer be allowed on the property under any circumstances, at the request of the owner. “I was amused,” Parachini says. “I thought it was a silly, petty, juvenile thing to do. I just laughed it off.” Hoffine Barr declined to comment on Parachini’s account of these events.

Hoffine Barr did not comment on any of the workers’ assertions about the use or strict enforcement of NDAs on the Kauai compound. She added that Zuckerberg, Chan, and their children view Koolau Ranch as their home.

As Meta has built a multibillion-dollar business on collecting user data to sell advertising, its founder and CEO has a track record of protecting his personal privacy. In 2004, when Facebook was The Facebook, Zuckerberg requested that two student journalists sign an NDA prior to an interview . The request was denied. In 2010, when a Facebook employee leaked product plans to the media, Zuckerberg described the leak as “an act of betrayal” in a staff email and demanded the leaker’s immediate resignation. “Let’s commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company — no exceptions,” he wrote. ”If you can’t handle that, then just leave. We have too much social good to build to have to deal with this.” More recently, Facebook’s contracted content monitors have been required to sign strict NDAs , in part to protect the user data they monitor, but which also prevent them from speaking out about allegedly poor working conditions. The treatment of these content monitors has sparked multiple lawsuits, including a 2018 suit against Facebook that was settled for $52 million .

Professor and privacy expert Danielle Citron describes visiting a Zuckerberg home in Silicon Valley in April 2018 and not seeing a way to reach the front door, before a thick hedge swung open revealing a secret entrance. Citron pointed to an irony in the “privacy for me but not for thee” attitude of social media moguls. “I would not be surprised if NDAs were the bubble wrap on every interaction for the privacy-conscious tech billionaires whose business is the sale of our personal data,” Citron says.

Hope Kallai lives on a 5-acre plot of land next to the Zuckerberg compound on Kauai. In 2016, two years after Zuckerberg purchased his first piece of land on the island, Kallai watched as a 6-foot wall was erected around portions of the property, ensuring privacy within the ranch, but denying her and other neighbors an ocean view as they walked or biked alongside the land. Recently, as construction has begun in earnest, the neighborhood has been transformed by cars and trucks circulating in and out. Loud noises, which Kallai says sound like gunshots, frequently ring out from the construction site.

The project brings a different character to the area, according to Jeff Lindner, another neighbor. “There used to not be any cars,” he says. Now, there is a lot of traffic. “They’re not there to enjoy the island,” he says of the influx of workers, many of whom he believes aren’t local to Kauai. “They’re there to get somewhere, and you’re in their way.”

Zuckerberg didn’t engage much with his new neighbors, Kallai and Lindner say. And the project hasn’t gone through any public review process, as is sometimes required for construction projects on this scale. On Kauai, a public review process can be triggered if a large private construction project occurs within a conservation zone known as a Special Management Area, and the structures on the Zuckerberg site fall outside of that zone, according to the county planning director. Still, Kallai says a community meeting on the project “would be really welcome.”

Hoffine Barr declined to comment on these neighbors’ specific criticisms of the project’s impact on the area and lack of public engagement throughout the process, but she did point to the fact that previous owners planned to build 80 luxury homes on the land.

“Mark and Priscilla value the time their family spends at Koolau Ranch and in the local community and are committed to preserving the ranch’s natural beauty,” says Hoffine Barr. “Under their care, less than one percent of the overall land is developed with the vast majority dedicated to farming, ranching, conservation, open spaces, and wildlife preservation.” Hoffine Barr adds that Zuckerberg and Chan are also working with wildlife conservation experts on the island to protect endangered or threatened wildlife populations.

After the wall came the lawsuits. Zuckerberg, through one of the 10 or so shell LLCs—a corporate structure that protects its owners from liability—that own the Kauai property on his behalf, filed litigation in December 2016 to essentially pressure some of the local landowners who held kuleana rights to around a dozen small plots of land within his ranch into selling. Hawaiian law allows the transfer of land to ancestral descendants without formal deeds, meaning that hundreds of descendants of the original landowners held small shares in parcels of the land within the Zuckerberg compound, and could legally enter the property to access them. The lawsuits gave those descendants the choice to either sell their stake in the land or bid for it at auction.

When the suits became public in January 2017, they triggered an intense backlash, and Zuckerberg backed off. In an op-ed in The Garden Island , he announced that he would abandon his involvement in the lawsuits and “work together with the community on a new approach.” But the legal process continued in part under Carlos Andrade, the kuleana descendant with the largest share of the properties, who had been tending the land for many years and who Zuckerberg voiced support for in his op-ed. Although Zuckerberg’s company, Northshore Kalo LLC, removed its name from the lawsuit, and was instead listed as a defendant, it continued buying up descendants’ shares. According to real estate records reviewed by The Guardian , Northshore Kalo LLC paid out more than $450,000 in 71 transactions between 2016 and 2018, increasing its stake in the parcels from 24.1 percent to 43.9 percent.

In June 2019, the four remaining parcels were put up for auction, pitting Andrade against a coalition of other descendants who had elected not to sell their shares. Andrade, a retired Hawaiian Studies professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was the winning bidder in a competitive auction, paying a total of $2.14 million for the contested land. Some outbid relatives believed that Zuckerberg had backed Andrade financially.

“We think after being outbid by a retired college professor spending $2,145,000, it is now clear that something very wrong is going on,” Wayne Rapozo, a descendant who represented a coalition of other relatives at auction, said at the time . Hoffine Barr did not respond to questions about whether Zuckerberg had financially backed Andrade. She emphasized that Zuckerberg had supported Andrade’s claim because of his connection to the land, where he had lived, raised a family, and paid property taxes. Andrade passed away in 2022, and the kuleana lands are now held in a trust by his family, who regularly visit the property, Hoffine Barr said.

Many locals believe Zuckerberg’s legal maneuverings are another example of outsiders moving to Hawaii and taking advantage of people already living there. Zuckerberg faced a barrage of negative press around the time of the auctions, and a June 2020 petition citing the kuleana lawsuits and calling to “stop Mark Zuckerberg from colonizing Kauai,” received more than a million signatures.

In recent years, Zuckerberg and Chan appear to have launched a concerted effort to ease their transition into the Kauai community. Their local charity, the Chan Zuckerberg Kauai Community Fund, has given more than $20 million to various Kauai nonprofits since 2018.

With Zuckerberg’s status as a major philanthropist come political connections. Zuckerberg and Chan have established a relationship with Kauai mayor Derek Kawakami, holding meetings to discuss funding local initiatives during a 2018 flooding crisis and at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2021, the couple helped relaunch a county jobs program with a $4.2 million donation and gave $3.5 million to local Covid-19 assistance projects.

The compound also hired Arryl Kaneshiro, then sitting chair of the Kauai County Council, as an agricultural consultant. The son of another former county council member, Kaneshiro is a rancher and a popular politician who was reelected to four consecutive terms from 2014 to 2022. Neither Kaneshiro nor Hoffine Barr responded to questions regarding his pay, though ethics disclosures show that he took home more than $100,000 from his consulting practice in 2021, during his final term on the council. Local ethics rules do not require that politicians specify how much income they make over $100,000.

This sort of hiring is legal, so long as it is disclosed if matters specific to the Zuckerberg property come before the council. No such matters arose during Kaneshiro’s tenure.

In November 2021, Zuckerberg gave a $4 million gift to fund the purchase of a traditional Hawaiian fishpond managed by Malama Huleia, a local nonprofit that focuses on wetland restoration through Native Hawaiian cultural practices. That nonprofit also had ties to local government—the then vice chair of the county council Mason Chock had recently served as its president. Speaking to WIRED, Billy DeCosta, a member of the Kauai County Council, pointed to the fishpond donation and the hiring of Kaneshiro and questioned whether Zuckerberg had a “strategic plan to get all the big dogs on his side.”

Asked about Zuckerberg’s local political involvement, Hoffine Barr said that government leaders’ roles often overlap on the small island. Zuckerberg and his team have often tried to engage with the community, said Hoffine Barr.

“It’s good to have friends at any level of government,” says Scott Amey, general counsel for the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on the hiring of Kaneshiro. “Sometimes they can help with different issues or obtain information.”

On the other hand, an adversarial local government can throw a wrench into building plans — even those of billionaires. In New Zealand, for instance, PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel’s plans for a bunker-like lodge on the country’s South Island were shut down in 2022 when the local council decided the project would have a negative impact on the surrounding landscape.

With the string of donations, Zuckerberg and Chan are now among the most important philanthropists on Kauai.

The island’s nonprofits have taken notice, and many now look to their north shore neighbors as potential moonshot donors . Local Facebook pages regularly feature appeals to Zuckerberg to fix one problem or another. In an August 2022 Facebook post lamenting the lack of movie theaters on the island (there is only one), one commenter suggested that Zuckerberg could fund a new drive-in.

With his donations, jobs, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual property tax Zuckerberg pays—though the land is subject to a substantial agricultural tax discount— many view his presence as a net positive for the island. DeCosta, for instance, credits Zuckerberg for the construction jobs the compound creates and his charitable donations. “What’s better,” he asks, “one Zuckerberg who owns 1,000 acres, or 100 millionaires who each own 100 acres?”

Almost a decade after his first land purchase here, it’s unclear whether the local community on Kauai will ever fully accept their billionaire neighbor. “Zuckerberg’s presence may increase charity, but will not address the root causes of why we need this type of philanthropic charity in the first place,” says Nikki Cristobal, executive director of local Hawaiian education and arts nonprofit Kamawaelualani.

Many locals view the billionaire as a part of a larger machine, the same one that has been buying up Hawaiian land since the “Great Mahele” authorized private land ownership in 1848. Before this, the concept of private property did not exist in Hawaii . Though he has the highest net worth, Zuckerberg is far from the only wealthy outsider—or even the only billionaire—to purchase land and call Kauai their part-time home. Just south of the Zuckerberg property, Melaleuca billionaire Frank VanderSloot recently dropped $51 million on 2,000 acres of ranchland. As land becomes more desirable to wealthy mainlanders, properties increase in value, forcing locals to leave . “The people who are born and raised here can’t afford to live here,” says Laurel Brier, a former vocational counselor who lives a few miles south of the Zuckerberg compound. “And we have this whole new economy that is basically serving at the rich peoples’ whims. I don’t know how stable those kinds of jobs are.”

“It’s crazy that a man not from Hawaii comes here and purchases a bunch of land that limits the locals [from potentially buying] land,” says John, the former laborer on the Zuckerberg compound. “But it’s already been happening.”

It’s been happening, and not just on Kauai. As the amount and total net worth of billionaires continues to grow in the US, many have used their wealth to purchase island seclusion and security.

This year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent $147 million buying two mansions on Indian Creek Island in Florida, which is also home to the likes of Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner. The smaller Hawaiian island of Lanai, off the coast of Maui, is now almost completely owned by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison .

New Zealand, considered by some to be the ideal place to wait out an apocalyptic event, is now riddled with bunkers for the tech elite. Recently reinstalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to The New Yorker , where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel’s New Zealand properties in the case of an apocalyptic event. In his book Survival of the Richest , media theorist Douglass Rushkoff describes meeting with a group of billionaire preppers who bombarded him with questions about how best to configure their bunkers to survive the end times.

WIRED showed some of the planned bunker-esque elements of the Zuckerberg compound to Rushkoff earlier this year. “In order to justify having a palace, you’ve got to show you’ve done basic due diligence on its bunker capabilities,” Rushkoff says of the plans. “It shows it’s not just luxury. This is your skin in the game.”

In his book, Rushkoff criticizes what he calls “the mindset”—a belief that “with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods and transcend the calamities that befall everyone else.” In doing so, he writes, they apply the same exit strategy of Silicon Valley startups to civilization itself.

“If anybody has enough money to insulate himself from the damage created for society, it would be Zuck,” says Rushkoff. “That’s sort of what it is. He’s destroyed the government and society, and now he can go to Hawaii and build a fort.”

Updated: 12/14/2023, 11:55am EST: A misspelling of Priscilla Chan’s name has been corrected. Zuckerberg and Chan gave $3.5 million to local Covid-19 assistance projects.

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Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea for the Facebook 'poke' feature while he was drunk

• "Poke" is one of Facebook's oldest features, going back to when it was just for college kids.
• In a 2005 interview, Mark Zuckerberg said he came up with the idea while drunk.
• Poking is back ! Facebook has made it more prominent on the app, and pokes have gone up 13x.

For many of us, the most genius idea we've had while drunk is "we should order pizza." But when a young Mark Zuckerberg over-imbibed, he invented the "poke," the Facebook feature that is both the most creative thing Facebook has done — and one of the creepiest.

The poke was one of the earliest features of Facebook , which Zuckerberg launched in college in 2004 as The Facebook. Poking someone just sends them an alert that the other person gave them a poke. It could be flirty, it could be friendly, it could be just inscrutably weird.

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In 2005, when Facebook was still open only to college kids, "CBS Sunday Morning" did a segment about young tech founders, including a young woman who ran a website for camcorder reviews, the creator of the Firefox browser, and a young man named Mark Zuckerberg. In the interview, Zuckerberg describes to the tech journalist David Pogue how Facebook works.

Here's how he describes the poke feature:

There's this feature called poking where you just go to someone's profile and you can poke the person. And, like, what does that do? Nothing. It sends them a message — it's like, "You've been poked." And you know, like, who cares? I mean, it's like, I thought about it when I was drunk or something. And people really like poking each other for some reason that I don't think anyone can really explain.

Meta declined to comment. Meanwhile, improbably, the poke is having a comeback.

Facebook made a design tweak to make the poke button more prominent; it had previously been hidden away and almost impossible to find. It also made it easier to find the page where all your pokes live (try searching "pokes" on Facebook).

The result was that poking went up 13-fold in a short period, and mostly by younger Gen Z users who probably weren't on Facebook the first time the poke was popular.

Watch: Tinder is 'obsessively' thinking about how to reach Gen Z, says CMO Melissa Hobley

• Main content

As most AI execs scramble for more data, Mark Zuckerberg says there's actually something more 'valuable'

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in on the AI data race in a new interview.
• As the AI arms race heats up, many tech companies are scrambling for new data sources.
• But Zuckerberg says 'feedback loops' will be more important for training AI models than data.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a hot take on Big Tech's race for AI training data: It's not about the data.

"The thing that I think is going to be more valuable is the feedback loops rather than any kind of upfront corpus," Zuckerberg said in an interview with the Command Line , a tech industry newsletter.

Feedback loops are used to retrain and improve AI models over time based on their previous outputs. These algorithms let AI models know when they make an error, for example, and provide them with data to adjust their future performance.

"Having a lot of people use it and then seeing how people use it and being able to improve from there is actually going to be a more differentiating thing over time," he said.

Sourcing new data for their insatiable AI models to consume —which theoretically will make them smarter — is now an obsession for companies racing to dominate AI.

Companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, and others have considered some wild solutions . Meta, for instance, was so desperate for data at one point that it considered buying the publishing company Simon & Schuster and even weighed risking copyright lawsuits for more material, The New York Times reported .

Another solution to the problem of limited data is just creating new data, something Big Tech calls "synthetic data." Synthetic data is artificially generated and designed to mimic data generated by real-world events. Zuckerberg's into it.

"I think there's going to be a lot in synthetic data, where you are having the models trying to churn on different problems and see which paths end up working, and then use that to reinforce," he said.

Anthropic, the maker of chatbot Claude, has also fed internally generated data into its models . And ChatGPT maker OpenAI is considering it, although CEO Sam Altman said at a conference last May that the key is having a model "smart enough to make good synthetic data."

And while Zuckerberg sees feedback loops as the key to building powerful AI models, there are also risks in relying on them. They could reinforce some of their mistakes, limitations, and biases if they're not trained on "good data" to begin with.

If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Business Insider on Microsoft Start.

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