On the afternoon of Nov. 16,
2010, Mark Zuckerberg was
leading a meeting in the
Aquarium, one of Facebook's
conference rooms, so named
because it's in the middle of a
huge work space and has glass
walls on three sides so
everybody can see in. Conference
rooms are a big deal at Facebook
because they're the only places
anybody has any privacy at all,
even the bare minimum of
privacy the Aquarium gets you.
Otherwise the space is open
plan: no cubicles, no offices, no
walls, just a rolling tundra of
office furniture. Sheryl Sandberg,
Facebook's COO, who used to be
Lawrence Summers' chief of staff
at the Treasury Department,
doesn't have an office.
Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO and
co-founder and presiding
visionary, doesn't have an office.
The team was going over the
launch of Facebook's revamped
Messages service, which had
happened the day before and
gone off without a hitch or
rather without more than the
usual number of hitches.
Zuckerberg kept the meeting on
track, pushing briskly through
his points — no notes or
whiteboard, just talking with his
hands — but the tone was
relaxed. Much has been made of
Zuckerberg's legendarily
awkward social manner, but in a
room like this, he's the Silicon
Valley equivalent of George
Plimpton. He bantered with
Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a
director of engineering who ran
the project. (Boz was
Zuckerberg's instructor in a
course on artificial intelligence
when they were at Harvard. He
says his future boss didn't do
very well. Though, in fairness,
Zuckerberg did invent Facebook
that semester.) Apart from a
journalist sitting in the corner, no
one in the room looked over 30,
and apart from the journalist's
public relations escort, it was
boys only.
(See pictures inside Mark
Zuckerberg's inner circle.)
The door opened, and a
distinguished-looking gray-
haired man burst in — it's the
only way to describe his entrance
— trailed by a couple of deputies.
He was both the oldest person in
the room by 20 years and the
only one wearing a suit. He was
in the building, he explained with
the delighted air of a man about
to secure ironclad bragging
rights forever, and he just had to
stop in and introduce himself to
Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller,
director of the FBI, pleased to
meet you.
They shook hands and chatted
about nothing for a couple of
minutes, and then Mueller left.
There was a giddy silence while
everybody just looked at one
another as if to say, What the hell
just happened?
It's a fair question. Almost seven
years ago, in February 2004,
when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-
old sophomore at Harvard, he
started a Web service from his
dorm. It was called
Thefacebook.com, and it was
billed as "an online directory that
connects people through social
networks at colleges." This year,
Facebook — now minus the the
— added its 550 millionth
member. One out of every dozen
people on the planet has a
Facebook account. They speak 75
languages and collectively lavish
more than 700 billion minutes on
Facebook every month. Last
month the site accounted for 1
out of 4 American page views. Its
membership is currently growing
at a rate of about 700,000
people a day.
(See a Zuckerberg family photo
album.)
What just happened? In less than
seven years, Zuckerberg wired
together a twelfth of humanity
into a single network, thereby
creating a social entity almost
twice as large as the U.S. If
Facebook were a country it
would be the third largest,
behind only China and India. It
started out as a lark, a diversion,
but it has turned into something
real, something that has changed
the way human beings relate to
one another on a species-wide
scale. We are now running our
social lives through a for-profit
network that, on paper at least,
has made Zuckerberg a
billionaire six times over.
Facebook has merged with the
social fabric of American life, and
not just American but human life:
nearly half of all Americans have
a Facebook account, but 70% of
Facebook users live outside the
U.S. It's a permanent fact of our
global social reality. We have
entered the Facebook age, and
Mark Zuckerberg is the man who
brought us here.
(See pictures of Facebook's
overseas offices.)
Zuckerberg is part of the last
generation of human beings
who will remember life before
the Internet, though only just. He
was born in 1984 and grew up
in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the son of a
dentist — Painless Dr. Z's slogan
was, and is, "We cater to
cowards." Mark has three sisters,
the eldest of whom, Randi, is
now Facebook's head of
consumer marketing and social-
good initiatives. It was a
supportive household that
produced confident children. The
young Mark was "strong-willed
and relentless," according to his
father Ed. "For some kids, their
questions could be answered
with a simple yes or no," he says.
"For Mark, if he asked for
something, yes by itself would
work, but no required much
more. If you were going to say
no to him, you had better be
prepared with a strong
argument backed by facts,
experiences, logic, reasons. We
envisioned him becoming a
lawyer one day, with a near
100% success rate of convincing
juries."
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