With a fortune of $ 63 billion, 34-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is now considered one of the richest people in the world, putting his name next to other pioneers such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
In the list of the richest people in the world in 2017, Zuckerberg was in fifth place. An American of Jewish descent, a programmer and businessman, he co-founded Facebook with three of his Harvard classmates.
It all started on October 28, 2003, a night that Mark had drunk "a little more". That night, Zuckerberg set up the Facemash website. It hosted photos of all Harvard students and each visitor could vote on which one they thought was best. The site had so much traffic that it dropped the university server.
"Facemash" closed after a few days and Zuckerberg was accused of violating students' personal data because he had not obtained permission to upload the photos online. The first failed attempt at social networking gave birth to the idea of "Facebook".
In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing the code for "The Facebook," and on February 4, the site became a reality. Anyone who was a student at Harvard could become a member and very quickly everyone had their own profile. In the first 24 hours more than 1.200 people had joined. Just six days had passed when three students accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea.
A legal dispute ensued and the two sides reached a compromise with the three plaintiffs receiving huge compensation.
When it was founded, Facebook was intended for use only by Harvard students. But when Zuckerberg realized that Facebook could grow into something big, he decided to leave Harvard in the middle of his studies to pursue it. As he said: "It took me 5 minutes to decide that I had to leave".
He then moved to Palo Alto, California, where Facebook is now headquartered. Perhaps the most important decision of his career was his refusal to sell Facebook to Yahoo for the outrageous sum of one billion dollars. Today the company is worth more than $ 500 billion. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the youngest billionaires in the world and Facebook now has over 2 billion users.
The film "The Social Network" chronicles the founding of "Facebook", but has been criticized for falsifying the truth. She won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Aaron Sorkin, while she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and A; Actor for Jesse Eisenberg, played by Mark Zuckerberg.
In recent days, the young Croesus is in an extremely difficult position. A campaign titled "Abandon Facebook" (#deletefacebook) has launched on the internet amid the scandal with the leak of personal data of more than 50 million users of the social networking site, which is under fire from all sides and sees its share in the stock market to fall.
The personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users has been made available to Cambridge Analytica without their consent. The data was reportedly collected through an application developed for Facebook by Cambridge University psychology professor Alexander Kogan.
The social networking site initially reported that it was "misled". Zuckerberg himself broke his silence days later and admitted that the site "made mistakes". "It's a very serious breach of trust and I'm really sorry it happened. "It's our responsibility to ensure that it does not happen again," he said, leaving open the possibility of regulating Facebook.
The head of Facebook also indicated that he is willing to testify before the Congress about the scandal with the leakage of personal data.
When Zuckerberg's first statement was posted, those who read it immediately noticed that he did not apologize. He later said in an interview that he apologized: "So this is a breach of trust and I sincerely regret it," he told CNN, Wired and Recode, and the New York Times the same day.
And he does regret it: he regrets the plunge in his stock and the blow to his credibility that Facebook has suffered from which he may never fully recover.
As a BBC journalist comments, his apology is for the result, not for the cause and "let us not forget that it is possible for someone to feel sorry for himself".