The start-up, born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, has become an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.
As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg, who was born May 14, 1984. He has traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie while visiting media outfits like "The Oprah Winfrey Show." And he says Facebook's most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information -- photographs, news articles and status updates -- zipping across its servers.
A new movie about the tumultuous origins of Facebook, "The Social Network," opened in October 2010. Facebook strenuously, and Mr. Zuckerberg more quietly, asserted that the portrayal of the company's founding is fiction. And Mr. Zuckerberg disputed the characterization of him in the film, though in a New Yorker magazine profile, he acknowledged having indulged in a bit of sophomoric arrogance.
Shortly before the film's opening, the real-life Mr. Zuckerberg made headlines by donating $100 million to improve the long-troubled public schools of Newark, N.J.
In 2009, Mr. Zuckerberg's stake in Facebook, which is not publicly traded, was valued at $2 billion, making him the world's youngest billionaire. The next year, when Facebook was valued at $23 billion, Forbes put his share at $6.9 billion. An investment by Goldman Sachs in January 2011 set the value of the company at $50 billion, putting Mr. Zuckerberg in a league with the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are reportedly worth $15 billion apiece.
Mr. Zuckerberg grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., dropped out of Harvard to build the company and now lives in California. During its rise, he fended off numerous offers to sell Facebook, and in late 2010 discouraged speculation that it might go public anytime soon.
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