Facebook Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook. At Harvard, Hughes met and was recruited by
Mark Zuckerberg, who was still working in the early stages of the website. During their summer break in 2004, Hughes and Zuckerberg traveled to
Palo Alto, California. While Zuckerberg decided to remain in Palo Alto after the break, Hughes returned to Harvard to continue his studies. When Facebook's initial public offering took place in 2012, Hughes made $500 million.
After Facebook In March 2009, Hughes was named
Entrepreneur in Residence at
General Catalyst, a
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
venture-capital firm. in 2010 Hughes was the executive director of
Jumo, a non-profit social network organization he founded in 2010, which "aims to help people find ways to help the world". In July 2010,
UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on
HIV/AIDS) appointed him to a 17-member "High Level Commission" of renowned politicians, business leaders, human rights activists, and scientists tasked with spearheading a "social and political action campaign over the coming year aimed at galvanizing support for effective HIV prevention programmes."
The New Republic In March 2012, Hughes purchased a majority stake in
The New Republic magazine. He became the publisher and executive chairman and also served as editor-in-chief of the magazine. In December 2014, shortly after the magazine's centennial celebration, editor
Franklin Foer and literary editor
Leon Wieseltier were "driven out," and dozens of other staff and contributing editors resigned after a new chief executive,
Guy Vidra, a former
Yahoo! employee, described the new direction of the magazine as a "vertically integrated digital media company." The magazine was forced to cancel its upcoming issue due to the staff departures. On January 11, 2016, Hughes put
The New Republic up for sale, saying he had "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today's quickly evolving climate." He sold the magazine on February 26, 2016, to Oregon publisher
Win McCormack. In 2025, he published
Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy. In May 2019, he published an
op-ed in the
New York Times, calling for the break-up of Facebook and government regulation of content on it; in June of the same year, he criticized the Facebook decision to launch
Libra (which was later renamed
Diem), saying that the cryptocurrency "would shift power into the wrong hands if, at least, the coin be modestly successful". He is completing his PhD in business ethics at the Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He publishes his thoughts and political commentary on his
Substack. ==Political involvement==