Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been named Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2010.
According to Time, the 26-year-old billionaire is the youngest "Person of the Year" since the first one chosen, Charles Lindbergh; he was 25 when he was named in 1927.
“For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year,” reads Time in its explanation for singling out Zuckerberg.
The article goes on to describe Facebook’s enormous impact on every day society: “In a single day, about a billion new pieces of content are posted on Facebook. It is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third largest country on earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does.”Zuckerberg co-developed Facebook with his college roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, in 2004 while they were Harvard undergrads. Facebook got its start as an inter-Harvard project, but in 2006 the company opened membership to anyone over 13 with a valid e-mail address.
It’s a fascinating history brought to life in the feature film, “The Social Network,” a cinematic account of Mark Zuckerberg and his creation of the social networking phenomenon. “The Social Network” opened on the first weekend of October and earned itself the No. 1 spot with total box-office earnings amounting to approximately $23 million.
Receiving mixed reviews, however, was Zuckerberg’s donation of $100 million to the Newark, N.J., school system a few months ago. In an episode of The Oprah Show, Zuckerberg pledged his donation in Facebook stock alongside Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Zuckerberg’s detractors are crying foul, saying that his charitable donation intentionally coincided with the release of “The Social Network” in order to polish his steely portrayal in the film.
Controversy aside, there’s no denying Zuckerberg’s genius.
Edited by
Jaclyn Allard
