Before this year, Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, was primarily known as a mysterious, sweatshirted figure, a Silicon Valley wunderkind familiar mainly to those in tech circles.
However, this year Zuckerberg has been thrust into pop culture ubiquity, appearing on screens of all shapes and sizes, from Oprah to one of the year’s most acclaimed films.
On Wednesday his public ascent was solidified by Time magazine, which named him its “Person of the Year.” He’s the youngest choice for the honor since the first one chosen, Charles Lindbergh in 1927.
In a posting — where else? — on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said being named Time’s “Person of the Year” was “a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
It caps a remarkable year for Zuckerberg and Facebook, which has more than 500 million users worldwide and market valuations that go into double-digit billions. In countless redesigns and new features, Facebook has been pushing toward becoming not just a social media hangout, but also the underlying, connecting fabric of the Internet.
Time, which many expected to choose the news-making -WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange for “Person of the Year,” cited Zuckerberg “for changing how we all live our lives.”
“I’m trying to make the world a more open place,” Zuckerberg says in the “bio” line of his own Facebook page.
Zuckerberg was perhaps prompted to expand his public persona because others were doing it for him.
The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed drama of the contentious creation of Facebook, has supplied a narrative that in some ways is unkind to Zuckerberg and Facebook.
The film depicts Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) as a brilliant, power-hungry, back--stabbing hacker motivated by social acceptance and girls. Facebook has called the film (which Sorkin wrote based partly on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and without Zuckerberg’s cooperation) “fiction.”
However, that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a sensation with critics and moviegoers, and arguably the most talked-about film of the year.
It has established itself as an Oscar front-runner.
The New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review have all picked The Social Network as the best film of the year. On Tuesday, it received six Golden Globe nominations, including best picture, drama, going up against its chief rival, the British monarchy tale The King’s Speech, which led with seven nominations.
Zuckerberg countered the release of the film with a US$100 million donation over five years to the Newark, New Jersey, school system.
He appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to announce the donation.
He’s in the company of media titans Carl Icahn, Barry Diller and others who have joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and -investor Warren Buffett to commit the country’s wealthiest people to step up their charitable donations.
Ahead of the release of The Social Network, Sorkin defended the movie’s veracity.
“I have to believe that their PR people are every bit as good as our PR people, and they’ve decided just to say ‘fiction’ as often as they can,” Sorkin said.
“They have not identified yet anything in the movie that’s been fictionalized. They’ve nibbled around the edges a little bit that he was drinking a Manhattan when he was really drinking a martini, and that kind of thing, but they’re not going to be able to. The movie’s true,” Sarkin said.
Fincher, for his part, professed sympathy for Zuckerberg, and said he understood the pressure of being a young talent with little patience for those less intelligent.
He said accuracy was important, but that it was worth remembering the stakes: “You’re talking about people who had their feelings hurt.”
For Zuckerberg, though, the film turned out to be less something to fear than to scoff at. He even took the whole company to see The Social Network, buying out two theaters for the occasion.
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