How Mark built the fortune
Zuckerberg's fortune consists mainly of his shares in Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook. He has run the business since its first months, and through a dual-class share structure he controls a majority of the voting power while owning roughly an eighth of the company's economic value. That control has allowed him to make large, long-term bets without fear of being overruled by other shareholders.
Facebook started as a campus directory and spread quickly from Harvard to other universities, then to high schools and finally to anyone with an email address. The company found its business model in targeted advertising, using what people shared and engaged with to help marketers reach specific audiences. The shift of users to smartphones around the time of its 2012 public listing briefly worried investors, but Facebook rebuilt its ad products for mobile and its revenue rose steeply over the following decade.
Two acquisitions proved especially valuable. Instagram, bought in 2012, became one of the largest social apps in the world, and WhatsApp, acquired in 2014, gave the company a messaging service used by billions of people. Their advertising and business messaging revenue now supports much of Meta's market value.
Companies and holdings
Meta's family of apps includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads, the text-based network launched in 2023. Its Reality Labs division develops virtual reality headsets under the Quest brand and smart glasses made with the eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, a unit that has lost large sums each year as Zuckerberg pursues his vision of computing beyond the phone.
Artificial intelligence has become the other main focus. Meta releases the Llama family of open-weight language models, has spent heavily on data centers and chips, and in 2025 took a large minority stake in the data labeling firm Scale AI while forming a new superintelligence research group. Zuckerberg changed the company's name to Meta in 2021 to signal its broader ambitions.
Early life and career
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, in May 1984 and grew up in nearby Dobbs Ferry, where his father ran a dental practice and his mother worked as a psychiatrist. He started programming as a child, built a messaging system for his father's office, and at Phillips Exeter Academy wrote a music recommendation program that drew interest from larger technology companies.
He enrolled at Harvard in 2002 to study computer science and psychology. In February 2004 he launched TheFacebook from his dormitory with several classmates, including Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. That summer he moved the project to Palo Alto, raised early money from investor Peter Thiel, and did not return to university. Harvard awarded him an honorary degree in 2017.
The early years brought legal disputes as well as growth. Classmates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss argued that he had taken their idea for a campus network, and Saverin sued after his stake was diluted; both cases ended in settlements. Zuckerberg turned down several acquisition offers in that period, including a widely reported approach from Yahoo in 2006, and kept the company independent through its public listing.
Philanthropy and public life
In December 2015, after the birth of their first daughter, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they would give 99 percent of their Meta shares during their lifetimes. They set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as a limited liability company rather than a traditional foundation, which allows it to make investments and engage in policy work as well as grants. Its largest program is the Biohub network, which funds basic research aimed at curing or managing diseases, and it also builds tools for scientists, including artificial intelligence models for biology.
Zuckerberg has testified several times before the US Congress and other legislatures on privacy, misinformation and the effects of social media on young people. Earlier gifts include a 100 million dollar donation to schools in Newark, New Jersey, in 2010. He co-founded the Breakthrough Prize with other technology donors, and the couple has also funded hospitals and medical research in the San Francisco Bay Area.