In his letter on the borsen prospectus, he also focuses on the platform’s "social mission": it’s about "making the world more open and interconnected". With facebook’s stock exchange, this vision will turn zuckerberg from an aubenseiter at the elite university of harvard into a multi-billionaire within eight years. Zuckerberg holds a good 28 percent stake in facebook. If the stock is valued at 100 billion dollars, as expected, the 27-year-old would suddenly be a man with a fortune of 28 billion dollars.
Zuckerberg could have become a billionaire a long time ago, however. Back in 2006, then yahoo CEO terry semel confidently offered a billion dollars for the small network with less than ten million users. To the great surprise of the former hollywood fox semel, zuckerberg rejected kuhl, just as he had done with later lucrative offers. Facebook is his baby, his life’s work, and he doesn’t want to let it go.
For this reason, zuckerberg was not very interested in bringing facebook to the stock exchange for a long time. The company has always had enough money thanks to the interest of risk investors, meanwhile billions are coming in from online advertising, and he himself lives a very modest life. As a listed company, you have to disclose your figures, meet investors’ profit expectations, and maintain your share price.
That’s why he wants to fly under the borsians’ radar for as long as possible, zuckerberg stressed. In the end, it’s only the sheer size of facebook that forces the company onto the stock exchange: when it reaches the threshold of 500 shareholders, facebook has to disclose its business figures anyway under US stock exchange law.
Zuckerberg, however, made sure that he would still be in charge even after a borsengang. He keeps class B shares, each of which has ten votes – investors, on the other hand, get shares with only one vote. So zuckerberg was able to keep a firm grip on his company, even with a small shareholding. In the prospectus, of all things, he told investors that facebook’s profit was not the primary concern: "we don’t develop services to make money; we make money to develop better services."
While his former investor and mentor sean parker attracted attention in the early years of facebook with his many parties, zuckerberg still looks like a perpetual student in his typical hooded sweatshirt. His private life is as unspectacular as can be. He has been together with his girlfriend priscilla chan since his student days, and only bought his first home last year.
As awkward as mark zuckerberg may seem in his public appearances, he is just as dogged when it comes to his vision for the "social internet". A "facebook" layer should permeate all life situations – he has been pushing this idea from the beginning with almost stubborn persistence. More than once facebook had to take a step back because it was going too fast for users.
A typical example was the beacon service launched in 2007, which automatically communicated purchases to facebook friends. After an outcry from many members and a class action lawsuit, beacon (lighthouse) was finally shut down in 2009. There was also fierce criticism when the default setting for facebook profiles was suddenly changed to "public" – which meant that many private photos ended up openly on the internet, even of the facebook founder himself.
Zuckerberg learned from the controversies that you have to give the users more time. Today, more than 250 million photos are uploaded to the platform every day. And around 845 million people worldwide trust facebook and zuckerberg with their data.
The man who consistently tries to persuade the world to be more and more open reveals very little about himself. The best way to get a glimpse of his life is to follow his dog beast’s profile on facebook. Zuckerberg recently made headlines with his decision to only eat the meat of animals that he himself had killed.
Zuckerberg rescues the chaotic founding period from an overly conservative image, which – also with the lure of the borsen billions – ensured years of conflict with accusations of plagiarism, lawsuits and a lot of dirty laundry. All the cinematic material that hollywood brought to the big screen with "the social network.
Twins tyler and cameron winklevoss played a leading role in the facebook dispute: they accuse zuckerberg of stealing the facebook idea from them. In a settlement they negotiated more than 100 million dollars, but then wanted even more. Later, a former wood pellet trader also emerged, claiming to be a booted-out business partner with a claim to a quarter of facebook. The network accuses the man of having simply falsified the contract presented as evidence.