Mark Zuckerberg becomes the youngest self-made billionaire ever

Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founder of Facebook has made Forbes' magazine's richest list. He's reportedly the youngest billionaire in the world right now, with an estimated wealth of $1.5 billion, and he might be the youngest self-made billionaire ever.



Zuckerberg was born to a Jewish-American family and raised in Dobbs Ferry, Westchester County, New York. He began programming computers in sixth grade. Zuckerberg attended Ardsley High School and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 2002.

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 A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg's Internet access was revoked by administration officials.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

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. According to sources, Zuckerberg wrote the original code for the site in less than two weeks. It quickly became a success at Harvard and more than two-thirds of the school's students signed up in the first two weeks. Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford, Columbia and Yale and then to other Ivy League colleges and schools in the Boston area. By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost 30 schools.

Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California with Moskovitz and some friends during the summer of 2004. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto a few months later. Today, the company has four buildings in downtown Palo Alto, forming what Zuckerberg calls an "urban campus". CREDIT: Wikipedia