Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, on May 14, 1984, the son of psychiatrist Karen (née Kempner) and dentist Edward Zuckerberg. He and his three sisters (Arielle, businesswoman Randi, and writer Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household in Dobbs Ferry, New York. His great-grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland. He attended high school at Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He was captain of the fencing team     

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with each other.During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. A New Yorker profile said of Zuckerberg: "some kids played computer games. Mark created them

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with each other. During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. A New Yorker profile said of Zuckerberg: "some kids played computer games. Mark created them.

Zuckerberg met his future wife, fellow Harvard student Priscilla Chan, at a frat party during his sophomore year there. They began dating in 2003, In September 2010, Chan, who was by then a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, moved into Zuckerberg's rented house in Palo Alto, California. On May 19, 2012, they married in the grounds of his mansion in an event that also celebrated her graduation from medical school. On July 31, 2015, Zuckerberg revealed that they were expecting a baby girl and that Chan had previously experienced three miscarriages. Their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg, was born on December 1, 2015. They announced in a Chinese New Year video that their daughter's Chinese name is Chen Mingyu Their second daughter, August, was born in August 2017. On September 21, 2022, Zuckerberg announced that he and Chan are expecting their third daughter, due in 2023.[188] The couple also have a Puli dog named Beast, who has over two million followers on Facebook.

Raised as a Reform Jew, Zuckerberg later identified as an atheist, but in 2016 said, "I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.

In 2017, Zuckerberg and his wife began a nationwide tour "to visit every state in the union and learn more about a sliver of the nearly two billion people who regularly use the social network". He met with farmers and business owners, and spoke at Mother Emanuel, where a shooting took place in 2015. 

In an August 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg said one of his biggest regrets was competing on the fencing team in high school instead of wrestling. Motherboard implicitly criticized this by comparing it to another potential regret: Facebook's "enabling genocide in Myanmar because it did not bother to hire moderators who speak Burmese", an incident for which Zuckerberg apologized at the time, In the same interview, he also said he regretted that Facebook had throttled posts about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.

The New Yorker noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy". He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos. Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, explained: