10 surprising facts about Mark Zuckerberg
1) Facebook is blue because Zuckerberg is color-blind: According to a 2010 profile from the New Yorker, Facebook’s main color is blue because Zuckerberg has a red-green color blindness. In the interview, he told reporter Jose Antonio Vargas that “blue is the richest color for me — I can see all of blue.”
2) He says he’s not that interested in money: This is a well-known fact, but one that continues to surprise. In several interviews and goals statements, Zuckerberg has made it clear that making money is not his first aim — connecting the world is.
“Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” Zuckerberg wrote in the company’s S-1 filing to go public.
3) He’s a fan of Taylor Swift: Yep. Says so on his Facebook profile.
4) He’s spent a year trying to only eat meat that he kills: Zuckerberg sets annual challenges for himself, and the challenge for 2011 was to move toward vegetarianismand only eat meat that he killed himself.
“The reason for this is that I feel lucky for having such a great life. I like eating meat and before this year I ate it almost every day,” he wrote. “In order to practice thankfulness, I want to be more connected to the food I eat and the animals that give their lives so I can eat them.”
5) He designed his wife’s wedding ring:Zuckerberg was the one who designed wife Priscilla Chan’s wedding ring, which is a ruby flanked on either side by diamonds. The ring has been a strange target of criticism, with the Daily Mail criticizing the gem’s size and saying that it’s not nearly the rock that one would expect of a billionaire.
6) He loves his dog: Okay, maybe this isn’t surprising, but it is an important fact about Zuckerberg, if his Facebook page is any indication. Beast Zuckerberg is a Puli, or a type of Hungarian sheepdog, and is the subject of several of Zuckerberg’s and Chan’s Facebook posts. He helped walk Chan down the aisle and even has his own page — on which he “says” he likes “cuddling and herding things.”
7) Zuckerberg’s many nicknames: To friends, he’s Zuck, but according to a 2010 report from CNN, his mom has her own special name for him: Princely.
The report also rounded up this tidbit from Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien: Zuckerberg’s nickname after joining his fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi was “Slayer.”
8) He once wore a tie every day for a whole year: Another one of his annual challenges that may surprise you: Zuckerberg once wore a tie every day for a year. That’s likely a surprise to anyone who knows that he normally wears a hoodie, jeans and sneakers — even when others think he shouldn’t.
But he went more formal for a year and outlined his reasons on his Facebook wall: “My 2009 challenge was to wear a tie for a whole year. After the start of the recession in 2008, I wanted to signal to everyone at Facebook that this was a serious year for us. Great companies thrive by investing more heavily while everyone else is cutting back during a recession. But great companies also make sure they're financially strong and sustainable. My tie was the symbol of how serious and important a year this was, and I wore it every day to show this.”
9) He really liked Andy Samberg’s impression of him on SNL: Zuckerberg is a figure of a lot of gentle (and not-so-gentle) ridicule in the media, but he particularly like the treatment he got on Saturday Night Live.
“Andy Samberg plays me on SNL. I'm a big Andy Samberg fan so I thought this was funny,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook Timeline. Samberg later reprised his Zuck impression for f8, the social network’s developer conference.
10) He once built a program called ZuckNet, just for his family: Again from theNew Yorker profile, Zuckerberg once built a program for his dad, Edward, who needed a quick messaging system for his dental office, and for the family home. It was, essentially, an early version of AOL’s Instant Messenger.
-washingtonpost.com-
Category: Hollywood gossip, Life Styles
0 comments