Facebook {{external media | width = 210px | float = right In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, in partnership with his roommates
Eduardo Saverin,
Andrew McCollum,
Dustin Moskovitz, and
Chris Hughes. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from
Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book", which students referred to as "The Facebook". Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their friends, and their telephone numbers. The three complained to
The Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation in response. While Zuckerberg tried to convince the editors not to run the story, he also broke into two of the editors' email accounts by using their private login data logs from TheFacebook. Following the official launch of the Facebook social media platform, the three filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg that resulted in a settlement. The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares and $20 million in cash (). Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until he decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate and co-founder
Dustin Moskovitz. They began with
Columbia University,
New York University,
Stanford University,
Dartmouth College,
Cornell University,
University of Pennsylvania,
Brown University, and
Yale University. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his second year in order to complete the project. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and the other co-founders moved to
Palo Alto, California, where they leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met
Peter Thiel, who invested in his company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard, but eventually decided to remain in California, where Zuckerberg appreciated the "mythical place" of
Silicon Valley, the center of computer technology in California. They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy the company. The same year, speaking at
Y Combinator's
Startup School course at
Stanford University, Zuckerberg made a
controversial assertion that "young people are just smarter" and that other entrepreneurs should bias towards hiring young people. Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg had sought the advice of former
Netscape CFO
Peter Currie regarding financing strategies for Facebook. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that Facebook had reached the 500-million-user mark. In 2010,
Steven Levy, who wrote the 1984 book
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a
hacker". Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better". Facebook instituted "
hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project.
Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the
Information Age". Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the
Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009. In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in
New Statesmans annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures. during their meeting at the Russian leader's residence outside Moscow, October 1, 2012 On October 1, 2012, Zuckerberg met with then-Russian Prime Minister
Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook's position in the Russian market. Russia's communications minister tweeted that Medvedev persuaded Zuckerberg to open a research center in Moscow instead of trying to lure away Russian programmers. In 2012, Facebook had roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic clone
VK had around 34 million. On August 19, 2013,
The Washington Post reported that Zuckerberg's Facebook profile was hacked by an unemployed web developer. At the 2013
TechCrunch Disrupt conference, held in September, Zuckerberg stated that he was working towards registering the 5 billion people who were not connected to the Internet as of the conference on Facebook. Zuckerberg then explained that this was intertwined with the aim of the
Internet.org project, whereby Facebook, with the support of other technology companies, sought to increase the number of people connected to the internet. Zuckerberg was the keynote speaker at the 2014
Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in
Barcelona, Spain, in March 2014, which was attended by 75,000 delegates. Various media sources highlighted the connection between Facebook's focus on mobile technology and Zuckerberg's speech, stating that mobile represented the future of the company. Alongside other American technology figures such as Jeff Bezos and
Tim Cook, Zuckerberg hosted visiting Chinese politician
Lu Wei, known as the "Internet czar" for his influence in the enforcement of China's online policy, at Facebook's headquarters on December 8, 2014. The meeting occurred after Zuckerberg participated in a Q&A session at
Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2014, where he conversed in
Mandarin Chinese. Zuckerberg receives a
one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. In June 2016,
Business Insider named Zuckerberg one of the "Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" along with
Elon Musk and
Sal Khan, due to the fact that he and his wife "pledged to give away 99% of their wealth-then estimated at $55.0 billion" (). On May 25, 2017, at Harvard's 366th commencement day, Zuckerberg, after giving a
commencement speech, received an honorary degree from Harvard. In January 2019, Zuckerberg laid plans to integrate an
end-to-end encrypted system for three major social media platforms, including Facebook,
Instagram and
WhatsApp. On August 14, 2020, Facebook integrated the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger on both iOS and Android devices. The update encouraged cross-communication between Instagram and Facebook users.
Other roles and projects in
Davos, Switzerland (January 2009) A month after Zuckerberg launched Facebook in February 2004,
i2hub, another campus-only service, created by
Wayne Chang and focusing on
peer-to-peer file sharing, was launched. At the time, both i2hub and Facebook were gaining the attention of the press and growing rapidly in users and publicity. In August 2004, Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum,
Adam D'Angelo, and
Sean Parker launched a competing peer-to-peer file sharing service called
Wirehog, a precursor to
Facebook Platform applications, which was launched in 2007. In 2013, Zuckerberg launched
Internet.org, which he described as an initiative to provide Internet access to the five billion people without it as of the launch date. The project faced significant opposition in India, where activists said its limited internet ran counter to the principle of
net neutrality; Zuckerberg responded by saying that a limited internet was better than no internet. Internet.org was shut down in India in February 2016. Zuckerberg is a board member of the
solar sail spacecraft development project
Breakthrough Starshot, which he co-founded with
Yuri Milner and
Stephen Hawking in 2016. In 2026, Zuckerberg was appointed to the
President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) by President
Donald Trump. == Lawsuits ==