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Le Monde
Le Monde
5 Feb 2024


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Facebook turns 20: Mark Zuckerberg's five lives

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Published today at 5:00 am (Paris), updated at 5:00 am

Time to 5 min. Lire en français

No one in the world has done more to encourage us to publish photos of ourselves on the internet. Twenty years after the creation of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has published countless images of himself on the social media network he founded – and on those he has acquired over time, such as Instagram. But like any other Facebook user, he hasn't always succeeded in imposing the image he wants to convey. Here's a look back at how Zuckerberg's image has evolved over time.

2004-2007: Harvard's enfant terrible

April 2004: For the first time, the American public had the opportunity to see Zuckerberg on television. Interviewed on CNBC, the visibly uncomfortable 19-year-old student described the workings of this strange site, which the channel's two hosts seemed to find a little hard to understand. At the time, "TheFacebook" was only available in a few universities and had around 100,000 users.

Zuckerberg's name was hardly known outside the university world. He was especially notorious at Harvard, where the computer science student once made headlines in the Harvard Crimson, the prestigious university's powerful student newspaper, after creating a site to compare the physiques of female students on campus, hacking into the university's photo databases in the process.

Then, in 2007, the company exploded: User growth was exponential, and the site launched one application system after another, followed by its much-criticized Beacon advertising service, which was subsequently abandoned. The business sought investors to support this unbridled expansion and attracted a great deal of interest. It eventually accepted an investment from Microsoft, after turning down takeover offers from Viacom and Yahoo!

On the front page of Fast Company, as in other headlines in the business press, Zuckerberg became "the kid who turned down a billion," the sum offered by Yahoo! In the media, as in everyday life, he was always dressed in a hoodie – in subsequent years, the hoodie would gradually be replaced by a gray T-shirt, always the same. He explained in 2014 that he didn't feel like wasting time every morning choosing an outfit.

2008-2012: The revenge of the nerd

At the turn of the 2010s, nothing seemed able to stop Zuckerberg, Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2010. Admittedly, he was not always at ease in interviews. In 2010, he sweated profusely on stage at the All Things Digital conference while being asked about privacy issues, which the press called a "Nixon moment." And Facebook's 2012 IPO was a failure, with the stock losing half its value in the following months.

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