YOUNGEST SELF MADE BILLIONAIRE

 Mark Zuckerberg

(Mark Zuckerberg)

The Facebook cofounder and CEO became a billionaire at age 23 after the social network's IPO in 2008, making Zuckerberg the youngest self-made billionaire in history at the time.Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, and was raised in nearby Dobbs Ferry.

 He was born into a well-educated family and developed an interest in computer programming at an early age.

(Mark Zuckerberg)

At the age of 12, Zuckerberg created a messaging program named Zucknet that he implemented as an inter-office communication system for his father's dental practice.Due to his early signs of success, his parents got him a computer programming tutor while he was still in high school, and they enrolled him in a prep school in New Hampshire. After graduating from prep school, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University.

(Mark Zuckerberg)

While many intelligent people attend Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg became known quickly as the go-to computer programmer on campus. By his sophomore year, he had already built two programs: CourseMatch and FaceMash.Both programs became wildly popular, but the university shut down the latter program after it was deemed to be inappropriate.

(Mark Zuckerberg)

Based on his acclaim on campus, Zuckerberg partnered with friends to create a social networking site that allowed Harvard students to connect with each other. The site officially went live in June 2004 under the name "The Facebook," and Zuckerberg ran it out of his dorm room.

After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to pursue what was now called Facebook, full-time. The website reached one million users by the end of 2004.

This explosion of user growth attracted the attention of many venture capital (VC) firms, and Zuckerberg eventually moved out to Silicon Valley in 2005. Facebook received its first round of venture capital investments from Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million in the site that was still only open to Ivy League students.

By the end of 2005, however, Facebook had opened up to students attending other schools, causing the website to reach 5.5 million users.2 Since 2005, Facebook received numerous acquisition offers from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft, has been through legal battles, and has greatly increased its user base.