The Harvard Sophomore

A dorm room in Kirkland House, Harvard, on February 4, 2004. The computer-science major who had enrolled there in September 2002 launches a site called TheFacebook out of it. On October 28, 2003, the same student had put up Facemash, a page that paired women's headshots taken from Harvard House face-books. He dropped out the following year.

After that, the numbers carry the story. By Mark Zuckerberg's twenty-third birthday Facebook had 30 million users; by his thirtieth, 1.4 billion; by his fortieth, 3.1 billion. He bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion and Oculus VR the same year for $2 billion. In October 2021 he rebranded the company Meta Platforms, and has since spent more than $60 billion of its money on the Reality Labs metaverse project.

Sterling Aldridge's biography opens earlier and follows the arc with the procedural rigour a twenty-year ascent demands: the Dobbs Ferry childhood as the second of four children of a dentist and a psychiatrist, the Phillips Exeter years and the Synapse Media Player that Microsoft tried to acquire before he reached college, the Harvard sophomore years and the long Winklevoss-ConnectU litigation, the Sean Parker introduction and the move to Palo Alto in the summer of 2004, the $1 billion Yahoo offer of 2006 that the board nearly accepted, the Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus deals, the 2016 Russian-interference controversy and the long Cambridge Analytica fallout, the 2018 Senate testimony, the Meta rebrand and the Reality Labs bill, and the MMA and jiu-jitsu of 2024 and the Kauai property development the press has spent the last two years covering.

What emerges is a portrait of the Harvard-dropout founder whose twenty-year company has reshaped human social communication more thoroughly than any in modern history — and of a metaverse pivot the rest of the industry is still trying to decide whether to believe in.