Winter in Cambridge, Massachusetts is unforgiving, but among the students wrapped in thick jackets on the Harvard campus, one figure stood out. A student in shorts, white socks, and flip-flops, walking unperturbed in the snow. To some, he was a strange sight, to others, simply Mark Zuckerberg.
A loner, a computer enthusiast since childhood and immersed in hours of screen time, Zuckerberg was laying the foundations for what would become one of the most powerful ventures in modern history. The defining moment came when, after a casual chat with a friend, he returned to his dorm room and added the finishing touches to the website he had been building for a long time. When his friend Eduardo Saverin entered the room, Zuckerberg said just two words: “It’s ready now.” On February 4, 2004, he pressed the button that uploaded “The Facebook” to the Internet, unaware that he was forever changing the way people would communicate.
Just two and a half years later, Yahoo offered $1 billion to buy the platform. Zuckerberg refused, believing its potential was much greater. Time proved him right.
In the early stages, Facebook's co-founders were Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin, who played a key role in financing the project. A significant turning point came when Zuckerberg met Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, who convinced the team to move to Palo Alto and suggested dropping the word "The" from the platform's name. Significant investments began to come in, including $500 from PayPal's Peter Thiel. Within a few months, Facebook had passed one million active users. In 2007, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company.
Success was also accompanied by conflicts. Eduardo Saverin left the company after intense legal battles with Zuckerberg, which ended in 2009 with a confidential out-of-court settlement. Saverin remained officially known as a co-founder, while the amount he received was never made public. Facebook also faced lawsuits from the Winklevoss brothers, who accused Zuckerberg of stealing the ConnectU idea. The case was closed with a $ 65 million settlement. Meanwhile, the social network became a global phenomenon. In 2011, Facebook played a key role in spreading the messages of the “Arab Spring”. In 2012, the company bought Instagram for $ 1 billion and went public on the stock market, raising $ 16 billion. That same year, Zuckerberg married Priscilla Chan. In the following years, Facebook passed one billion, then two billion active users, while in 2014 it bought WhatsApp for $ 22 billion. But that success was severely shaken by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It was revealed that the personal data of some 87 million users had been used without their consent for political purposes, including Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The investigations also revealed that big tech companies had privileged access to user data.
Zuckerberg was called to testify, and Facebook faced global criticism for privacy violations. However, the company continued to operate on a gigantic scale, with huge data centers, including the “Facebook Farm” in the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where millions of servers process messages, photos, and videos from billions of users every second. From a small room at Harvard, Facebook has grown into a platform that has profoundly influenced life, communication, and global society, with all the successes, dilemmas, and consequences that this brings.
