Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth

Background and career

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman, webmaster, and programmer who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms. He is its chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and controlling shareholder.

Zuckerberg briefly attended Harvard College, and launched Facebook there in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. He became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2008 at age 23 and has consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people. According to Forbes, Zuckerberg's estimated net worth stood at US$258 billion as of September 2026.

He has used his funds to organize multiple large donations, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. A film based on Zuckerberg's early career, legal troubles and initial success with Facebook, The Social Network, was released in 2010. His prominence and fast rise in the technology industry has prompted political and legal attention. He has been the subject of multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues such as user privacy.

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

Zuckerberg learned computer programming in his childhood. At about the age of eleven, he created "ZuckNet", a program that allowed computers at the family home 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. The New Yorker once said of Zuckerberg, "some kids played computer games. Mark created them." While still in high school, he attended Mercy College taking a graduate computer course on Thursday evenings.

How Mark Zuckerberg makes money

According to Forbes, Zuckerberg's estimated net worth stood at US$258 billion as of September 2026. The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares and $20 million in cash (equivalent to $28,047,543 in 2025). In June 2016, Business Insider named Zuckerberg one of the "Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" along with Elon Musk and Sal Khan, due to the fact that he and his wife "pledged to give away 99% of their wealth-then estimated at $55.0 billion" (equivalent to $72.2 billion in 2025).