Exactly 20 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and his four Harvard classmates and roommates—Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes—launched thefacebook.com, a website where college students could post information about themselves, exchange messages and befriend one another online. thefacebook.com was built upon a website Zuckerberg had created a year prior, called Facemash, which allowed Harvard students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students.

The founding story of Facebook (Meta (META)) was so full of drama that it inspired the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires and its subsequent film adaptation, The Social Network in 2010. Only four years after the launch of thefacebook.com, Zuckerberg was the only founder still holding an executive role in the company. Under his leadership, Facebook turned its first profit in 2009 and went public in 2012. In 2021, Zuckerberg rebranded the company into Meta Platforms, marking a new chapter that focuses no longer on social media but on cutting-edge technologies like Metaverse and artificial intelligence.

Although all of Zuckerberg’s cofounders left the company fairly early on, they are either billionaires or well-off enough to pursue their true passions today, thanks to their founding equity in........

© Observer