There is no question that Mark Zuckerberg is a brilliant, forward-thinking man. The young internet entrepreneur behind Facebook dropped out of Ivy League Harvard University to set up his Silicon Valley business.
Mark Zuckerberg is claimed to have an IQ of 152. This impressive score falls within the top 1% in intellectual ability among all human beings on the planet. The average American has an IQ of 98.
The billionaire co-founder of statistically the most used social media platform in the world was a gifted student.
Early Beginnings
Mark Elliott Zuckerberg was born in New York in May 1984, to a psychiatrist mother and dentist father. Hew grew up in a Jewish household and has German, Polish, and Austrian ancestry.
When Mark was in middle school, his father taught him to code and to write software. Mark expressed such an interest in the subject that his father, Edward, soon hired a software developer to tutor the budding programmer.
Genius Potential
Mark later attended Ardsley High School where he exceeded expectations and outclassed from his peers in academics and sports.
To keep the youngster challenged, he was transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, a private co-educational boarding school in New Hampshire.
There, Mark Zuckerberg consistently won prizes in astronomy, mathematics, and physics and was captain of the fencing team.
During his summer holidays, he also attended a camp for talented youth and experimented with machine learning.
While he was still in high school, Mark was already taking some college classes in software programming and building games with his friends.
At one point, Mark took it upon himself to improve communications in his father’s dental practice by building a network of computers.
It was a no-brainer that he was accepted into the prestigious Harvard University, writing on his college application that he was fluent in four languages.
College Career
Mark Zuckerberg enrolled in a psychology and computer science program at Harvard University and was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.
Along the way, he developed programs as a means of answering the needs presented by fellow students. One of the programs made it easier for students to select classes and form study groups, and yet another, created for fun, invited students to pick the most attractive student among them.
It was from these various experimental ideas and coding experiences that the idea for Facebook was born.
Mark did not graduate from Harvard; he opted instead to drop out in his second year to see to the success of his nascent business.
Later in 2017, Mark was invited to give the commencement address to the graduating class of Harvard University. He was given an honorary degree at the time in recognition of his leadership and commitment to change the world through technology.
The Introduction of Social Media
Facebook was co-founded by college roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The project was conceptualized from their dorm room in February 2004.
When Zuckerberg was only 19 years old, he and his friends created Facebook as a means for their fellow students to match names with their other classmates.
Whereas it was initially intended for use by college students, the popularity of the social media platform grew by leaps and bounds.
Users of the site extended beyond Hardvard to other college campuses. Very soon Facebook was available to a wider world and by 2012 had reached one billion users.
The Facebook Explosion
As of April 2020, Facebook is the most popular social network by number of active users.
According to Statistia.com, Facebook users number almost 2.5 billion on a monthly basis.
The one billion monthly active users mark was achieved in 2012 and Facebook has the honorary distinction of being the first social media platform ever to do so.
To put things into perspective, as a fledgling company in 2008, Facebook surpassed 100 million monthly active users by the end of September that same year.
It can be said that Mark Zuckerberg is singularly responsible for the way we communicate and socialize in today’s society.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Brilliance
According to an article printed in Forbes Magazine in 2012, the majority of tech billionaires, in addition to being scary rich, are also scary smart.
Mark Zuckerberg is listed as one of the 50 greatest living geniuses according to The Best Schools.org.
Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the list of Forbes 400 Richest in Tech in the top 10 spot in 2012. Fast forward to 2019 and he has climbed to number 4 and is the fifth youngest among the wealthiest overall Americans.
The co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Facebook has a staggering net worth of almost $80 billion. This is by no means down to luck, but his incredible brilliance, business savvy, and an uncanny knack at innovation.