Time's Person of the Year 2010 Is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Time Magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg Time's Person of the Year, according to the article below. The online vote for Person of the Year was won handily by Julian Assange, but the prize was given to the Facebook founder instead.




Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, named Time's Person of the Year 2010:
washingtonpost.com Wednesday, December 15, 2010; 12:11 PM

Time magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO their Person of the Year 2010. As Hayley Tsukayama reported:

Time magazine named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year for 2010. Zuckerberg, 26, owns about a quarter of Facebook's shares and is, to quote Time, "a billionaire six times over."

After pledging earlier this year to give $100 million to the Newark, N.J., school system, Zuckerberg last week joined the Giving Pledge--the effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to convince some of the country's richest to give away most of their wealth. Others that have joined the campaign include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media titan Barry Diller, CNN founder Ted Turner and filmmaker George Lucas.

On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg on Wednesday commented that "Being named as Time Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I'm happy to be a part of that."

As Melissa Bell explained, the online vote for Person of the Year was won handily by Julian Assange, but the prize was given to the Facebook founder instead:
Despite Julian Assange handily winning the online vote, the editors of Time opted for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, as their person of the year. The editor's letter said, "There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another," and that Zuckerberg is at the center of these changes

Read entire article

--------------------

“Startup: Education”, Mark Zuckerberg's $100 Million Foundation

 Regardless of what you might think of Zuckerberg, this foundation is excellent for the kids who will benefit. According to the following article, Zuckerberg is launching Startup: Education, a $100 million foundation dedicated to improving education in Newark, New Jersey and the rest of the U.S. The ultimate aim is to create a model for rewarding excellence in education on a national level. Great Job!
    . . . June


--------


Mark Zuckerberg Announces $100 Million Foundation: “Startup: Education”:
Mashable -Jennifer Van Grove

Punk, traitor, genius or philanthropic entrepreneur? Mark Zuckerberg can be described by many a colorful adjective, and on Friday, October 1, the world will watch Hollywood both celebrate and vilify Facebook’s founder in The Social Network.

Just one week in advance of the movie’s debut, Zuckerberg is launching Startup: Education, a $100 million foundation dedicated to improving education in Newark, New Jersey and the rest of the U.S. The ultimate aim is to create a model for rewarding excellence in education on a national level.

The fund, which was first revealed on Wednesday but formally announced today, will work with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s and Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s new bipartisan initiative, the Partnership for Education in Newark, which was also officially unveiled today. Zuckerberg and Christie will discuss the news in a media conference call this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. ET. Later, Christie and Booker will discuss the partnership on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In addition to working with Zuckerberg’s new foundation, the Partnership for Education in Newark will also work with the Newark Education and Youth Development Fund, a non-profit organization that aims to raise an additional $150 million for Newark’s youth. Currently, only 40% of Newark children can read and write at grade level by the end of third grade.

In a blog on the Startup: Education Facebook Page, Zuckerberg writes, “I believe in the Mayor and his vision, and that’s why I want to help them succeed. Using my own Facebook stock, I’m creating the Startup: Education foundation with over $100 million to invest in educating and improving the lives of young people. I’m also challenging others who want to improve education in America to match my contributions.”

Read More . . .

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Donates $100 Million In Facebook Shares

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO

According to the following article from Forbes, Mark Zuckerberg will make a $100 million pledge to the Newark School system. At only 26-years-old, he’s following in the charitable footsteps of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Regardless of how you might feel about these people personally, there's no question that their generosity is making a huge difference to many people's lives.
    .. June


-------------------


How Will Newark Turn Zuckerberg’s $100 Million Worth Of Facebook Shares Into Cash?
Steven Bertoni - Money Talks - Forbes:

This Friday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will reportedly appear on Oprah to announce his $100 million pledge to the Newark School system. At only 26-years-old, he’s following in the charitable footsteps of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

The pledge is the easy part. The difficult question is how will Newark turn the privately owned, illiquid shares of Facebook into usable cash for their troubled school system

Zuckerberg is worth $6.9 billion, but that is mostly paper wealth based on his ownership of Facebook. Zuck likely has very little cash on hand–he lives in a humble rented house in Silicon valley. So it’s natural that he’d pledge his Facebook shares instead of cash-money.

The trouble is that these shares are not listed on a registered exchange. Past Facebook transactions have occurred through private equity deals or have traded on exchanges like SecondMarket, which specialize in unregistered, hard-to-trade securities. People at SecondMarket declined to comment on the story.

These markets for unregistered shares are opaque and thinly traded. The current SecondMarket bid for shares of Facebook is $65–that puts a $28.6 billion valuation on Facebook; much richer than recent estimates of around $23 billion. The market price seems inflated.

Read on . . .

Is The Facebook Movie An Act Of Cold-Blooded Revenge?

The movie 'The Social Network' is due to be released and purports to be the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook. It's based on Ben Mezrich's book 'The Accidental Billionaires'. According to the following article, The Accidental Billionaires exists because one of Mark's Facebook cofounders pitched the book to Mezrich in an attempt to permanently damage Mark's reputation. Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg claim that it's all a lie. How can we tell?
   . . . June


-------------------------------------------

The Facebook Movie Is An Act Of Cold-Blooded Revenge - New, Unpublished IMs Tell The Real Story:

Tuesday, September 21, 2010 Nicholas Carlson, provided by Business Insider

On October 1, Columbia Pictures will release The Social Network, a film that portrays Facebook's CEO and cofounder, Mark Zuckerberg, as an arrogant nerd-punk who betrays friends and classmates in order to get what he wants – sex, money, and power.

The movie is fiction. So is the book it's based on – Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires.

Facebook hates the movie. Zuckerberg says he will not watch it.

Based on the early reviews of the movie, this makes sense.

According to sources – sources who despise Mark Zuckerberg and sources who admire him – the only reason The Accidental Billionaires exists is because one of Mark's Facebook cofounders pitched the book to Mezrich in an attempt to permanently damage Mark's reputation.

According to those sources, that cofounder and Harvard student is Eduardo Saverin.

This is the story of how Eduardo got so angry at Mark -- how, from Eduardo's perspective, Mark screwed him out of a huge chunk of Facebook stock. It's also the story of how Mark solved an early problem at Facebook, one that could potentially have prevented the company from becoming the global behemoth it is today.

The story is sourced from people involved in the founding year of Facebook, sources close to Facebook, and documents viewed by Business Insider. It includes previously unpublished emails and instant messages between Mark Zuckerberg and early Facebook colleagues and confidants.

Read more:

Mark Zuckerberg: Evil Genius Or Brilliant Classmate? See The Movie!

 So Mark Zuckerberg is the subject of a new movie The Social Network. Apparently, it purports to loosely tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, but it appears that it might stray from the facts here and there. It might be very interesting for some of his classmates who knew him then to critique the movie once it's out.
   . . . June


--------------------------

Zuckerberg: Evil Genius Or Brilliant Classmate?:
Rebecca Davis O'Brien, The Daily Beast 

As the movie The Social Network rolls toward theaters, Rebecca O’Brien writes about Zuckerberg’s reputation around Harvard, his fraternity nickname, and why Facebook was such a hit.

Hollywood biopics are often the inverse of political autobiographies: heavy on sex and drugs, light on weighty questions of morality and leadership. If the script leaked online and the trailers are any indication, the new movie The Social Network, which purports to tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, will play like a conversation between Hamlet and Joe Francis, as secretly recorded by Richard Nixon. It is paranoid, sleazy, and grim.

As the film tells it, during the winter of 2004, Zuckerberg, a curmudgeonly, craven genius, bristling against authority and embittered by the culture of wealth and privilege that excludes him, creates a social network to impress vapid women and the callow preppies of Harvard’s exclusive, all-male final clubs. The film’s Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg, hates Harvard students, disdains fraternities, and answers to nobody. Zuckerberg, with a kind of mad scientist’s zeal, seeks popularity, profit, and revenge. In the words of the film’s ubiquitous ad campaign, he is “Poet. Prophet. Billionaire.”

That completely misses the point. Zuckerberg is, indisputably, a savant. He has also, by most accounts, broken agreements and rules. After talking to one of Facebook’s co-founders and students who were at Harvard when Zuckerberg and I were classmates, there’s one outstanding question about the creator and CEO of the 500 million-member website that today is valued at somewhere between $24 billion and $32 billion. Zuckberg was an antiauthoritarian who, through some combination of outmaneuvering, technical wizardry, and intuition, became the guy in charge. But can we trust the antiauthoritarian once he becomes the authority?


Read more:

Paul Ceglia Produces Another Cancelled Check As "Proof"

Paul Ceglia's Facebook Claim Guy Who Says He Owns 84% Of Facebook Produces Another Cancelled Check To Mark Zuckerberg August 17, 2010 at 1:14 PM When we last left the story about the upstate New York man who is claiming he owns 84% of Facebook (), we had concluded that the digital "contract" Ceglia had produced was probably a fake.  We had also noted that Ceglia needed to answer three questions before we were inclined to believe him: 1.  Where was the payment trail? Ceglia had only produced a $1,000 check stub, which only appeared to cover a single payment for contract development work on a Ceglia company called StreetFax.  There was no evidence that a second payment for $1,000 for 50% of "The Face Book" had been made. 3.  Where was the original paper-based contract and when would a judge and Facebook be able to... Did Mark Zuckerberg sell Facebook for $3000? August 17, 2010 at 9:47 AM NEW YORK: The western New York man suing over claims he owns 84 percent of Facebook Inc has a copy of a $3,000 cashier's check his lawyer says is proof of a contract with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. The purported 2003 check is made out to Zuckerberg and dated three days before Paul Ceglia claims the two men signed a contract, according to the attorney.... Facebook May Make Location Announcement Wednesday August 17, 2010 at 12:24 AM We've just received an invitation to visit Facebook's Palo Alto campus on Wednesday to get "an update on the service’s features and products," and rumor has it the powers that be want to talk about location-based products. Kara Swisher at BoomTown her sources "indicate that Facebook will finally be rolling... Facebook Making Possible Location Announcement Wednesday August 16, 2010 at 11:23 PM We've just received an invitation to visit Facebook's Palo Alto campus on Wednesday to get "an update on the service’s features and products," and rumor has it the powers that be want to talk about location-based products. Kara Swisher at BoomTown her sources "indicate that Facebook will finally be rolling... This email was sent to dyna999399.face999399@blogger.com. Delivered by Feed My Inbox 230 Franklin Road Suite 814 Franklin, TN 37064 Account Login Unsubscribe Here

Paul Ceglia Files A Lawsuit Following His Arrest

According To The Buzz Log Facebook Owner Mark Zuckerberg admits he signed a contract with Ceglia when he worked for him in 2003. Paul Geglia files a lawsuit stating that he owns 84% of the company. He says he had forgotten all about the contract until he was arrested recently, then he started looking through some old files and found it. It must have felt like buried treasure!

The article below is from an interview on Bloomberg.com

June

--------------------------

Facebook Would-Be Owner Says He Owes His Claim to Arrest
By Bob Van Voris - Aug 2, 2010 12:01 AM EDT

Paul Ceglia, who claims in a lawsuit that he owns 84 percent of Facebook Inc., said his case wouldn’t have been possible if state troopers hadn’t come to his house in October to arrest him for fraud.

Ceglia’s arrest and a suit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo two months later, both the result of complaints related to his startup wood-pellet business, got him looking through old files to find assets to pay back customers, he said in an interview in his home in Wellsville, New York. One of those files held a forgotten 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg, now chief executive officer of Facebook, he said.

Ceglia, 37, a self-described environmentalist from western New York who wants to legalize drugs and has views on the evils of central banks, claims the contract entitles him to most of the company. If true, the claim, which would give him control of the world’s most-popular social networking service, would be worth about $21 billion, given estimates of the company’s value.

“If this thing hadn’t happened the way it happened, no way I would have ever started looking through these ancient folders,” Ceglia said of his pellet problems. “That contract would just be sitting in there gathering dust.”

In the weeks since Ceglia came to public attention with his lawsuit against Palo Alto, California-based Facebook and Zuckerberg, filed June 30 in New York state court, observers have been asking why he took so long to make his claim. His answer, it turns out, was he forgot about it.

Facebook said a photocopy of the contract, filed as an exhibit to the lawsuit, is a phony.

‘Absurd’

“Ceglia’s claims are absurd and his lawsuit is frivolous, if not outright fraudulent,” Facebook said in an e-mailed statement. “Ceglia has refused to produce the original contract and the copy we’ve seen is a forgery, with inconsistent margin sizes, inconsistent font sizes, and other glaring discrepancies,” the company said.

Ceglia, one of whose lawyers said the original is in a safe place, said he is eager to take on Zuckerberg, 26, and let a jury decide whether the contract is genuine.

“I’m coming after him,” Ceglia said. “A deal’s a deal.”

Read More

-------------------------------

Isn't it strange that this "deal" was entirely forgotten for so many years? Paul Ceglia files a lawsuit 7 years later and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't remember signing ownership away. It's going to get interesting!

June

Is Mark Zuckerberg In Danger If Losing The Civil Suit Over FACEBOOK?

What a Mess for Facebook! Mark Zuckerberg claims that he doesn't think he signed any such contract, while Paul Ceglia claims to have lots of evidence that he should own 84% of Facebook. I wouldn't want to bet of how this will work out.

I found this article about an interview that Paul Ceglia had with with the Wellsville Daily Reporter:

June
--------------------------

Ceglia's Facebook civil suit gaining steam in court and in media
By John Anderson Daily Reporter
Posted Jul 26, 2010 @ 10:44 AM

What a week for Facebook. First, the social network, which experts say is worth $24 billion, reached its 500 millionth user. Then, a civil suit against the company by a Wellsville man gained in credibility — in court and with the national media.

Paul Ceglia’s civil suit comes complete with a two-page “work for hire” contract allegedly signed by Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg and a signed receipt from Zuckerberg after Ceglia paid him $1,000. According to terms of the contract, Ceglia’s civil suit, filed by Hornell attorney Paul Argentieri, claims Ceglia owns 84 percent of Facebook.

This week, the “Today Show” featured the case, calling it a “big battle.” During an interview this past week with Diane Sawyer on “ABC World News with Diane Sawyer,” Zuckerberg answered a question about the signatures, though he did stumble and refered to the signature as “we” instead of from himself.

“I don’t think that we ... that, uhh, if we said that we were unsure, I think that was likely taken out of context. Because I think we were quite sure that we did not sign a contract that says that they have any right to ownership over Facebook,” said Zuckerberg.

Ceglia’s attorneys were in court this week in Buffalo. Days later, he watched the interview with Zuckerberg online and said he laughed.

Ceglia, who has only consented to interviews with the Wellsville Daily Reporter, said, “I remember when he signed the contract. We met in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Boston. I stayed there the night before and we met and signed the contract.”

Ceglia said he does not remember the name of the hotel, but said he has his credit card statement showing he purchased the room. The contract was signed on April 28, 2003.

“I guess he (Zuckerberg) is between a rock and a hard place. No one expected him to say ‘No, I did not sign a contract,’ because there is a huge amount of evidence which has yet to be disclosed,”? said Ceglia. “You will have to wait until all the facts come out in court ... I would not want to be Mark Zuckerberg.”

Read More Of The Article

--------------------------

Ceglia seems to be pretty confident doesn't he? How do you think it will all play out?

Leave me a comment

June

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Denies Ceglia's Claim!

This is a pretty strong reversal from the original statement, which stated that Mark Zuckerberg wasn't sure if he had signed the document or not. I think he had better get his message straight, particularly for the courts. Here's the latest article I found on the subject

June

---------------------------------------

Facebook says Zuckerberg signature likely 'forged'
Carolyn McCarthy CNET News | July 26, 2010 4:55 AM PDT

Facebook said in a statement Friday that a lawsuit from a man who claims he owns 84 percent of the company is based on a contract that was likely "forged." It's an unusually forceful denial coming from a company that prefers not to talk about pending litigation.

A Facebook lawyer had initially said that the company was "unsure" whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg had ever signed an agreement with the plaintiff, New York resident Paul Ceglia, to help build something called "The Face Book" in 2003 and in which Ceglia would have an 84 percent stake today. Documents provided by Ceglia indicated that something that appears to be Zuckerberg's signature does indeed appear on a contract. But in his high-profile "ABC World News" interview on Wednesday night, Zuckerberg said that "I think we were quite sure that we did not sign a contract that says that they have any right to ownership over Facebook."

Now, an official Facebook statement backs him up and goes so far as to say the company believes the contract is probably a phony.

Read More

---------------------------

This whole ownership is a very serious issue which is going to be decided by the courts. Billions of dollars are at stake. It seems to me that Mark is being a bit disingenuous by making a statement at all at this point. What do you think?

June