Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, in 1984 and co-founded Facebook from a Harvard dormitory in 2004. Over the following two decades the company, renamed Meta in 2021, grew into one of the largest internet platforms in history through the combined reach of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, with several billion monthly users between them.
Zuckerberg's most consequential strategic bet of the current decade has been the simultaneous pursuit of two long horizons: a multi-year, multi-tens-of-billions investment in mixed-reality hardware and the Reality Labs division, and an equally large investment in the open-weight Llama family of AI models, which has become the de facto reference architecture for the open-source side of the generative-AI ecosystem.
He retains majority voting control of Meta and operates with an unusually long owner's time horizon, which has insulated some of his bets from quarterly pressure while drawing sustained scrutiny from regulators on competition, content moderation and youth safety.