Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with over 2.8 billion monthly active users as of Q2 2022. But despite its immense popularity and cultural impact, the story of who exactly founded Facebook has been shrouded in some controversy over the years.
The Official Story
The official story is that Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Here’s a quick rundown of the key events:
- In 2003, Zuckerberg begins working on a social networking website called thefacebook.com while a student at Harvard. Saverin provides funding for the fledgling startup.
- The website launches in February 2004, initially limited only to Harvard students.
- The site quickly proves popular and expands to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually other universities.
- Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, Hughes and McCollum relocate to Palo Alto, California in the summer of 2004.
- In 2005, the company receives $12.7 million in funding from Accel Partners and businessman Peter Thiel. Zuckerberg is made CEO.
- Thefacebook.com officially changes its name to Facebook in 2005.
- Facebook continues expanding to high schools, international universities, and eventually the general public by 2006.
- Over the years, Facebook goes through rapid growth, eventually reaching over 2 billion users.
So in the official telling of Facebook’s early history, Zuckerberg is the founder who came up with the initial idea, coded the first version, and led the company in its early years and beyond.
Challenges to the Official Story
However, there have been some challenges made over the years to the narrative that Zuckerberg was the sole founder and original creator of Facebook.
Claims by Eduardo Saverin
Eduardo Saverin was Zuckerberg’s friend at Harvard who provided initial funding for Facebook (then called thefacebook.com). He had a large role in the company’s early days, handling business operations. However, his role soon diminished.
In 2005, Saverin’s shares in Facebook were significantly reduced as part of a financing round. Later, just before Facebook went public in 2012, Saverin decided to cash out his remaining shares in the company, receiving 4% of Facebook’s shares as part of a settlement.
Some of Saverin’s comments over the years have suggested he feels his contributions to Facebook’s founding and success have been underplayed. Though he has not directly claimed to be a Facebook co-founder, he has indicated he played a bigger role than was commonly suggested.
Claims in The Accidental Billionaires
The Accidental Billionaires is a 2009 book by Ben Mezrich that focuses on Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, and was later adapted into the film The Social Network. While a work of fiction, it was based on interviews with Eduardo Saverin and other principals.
In the book’s telling, Zuckerberg gets the idea for Facebook from three Harvard seniors – twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra. The book implies they hired Zuckerberg to help program their own social networking site called HarvardConnection, but then Zuckerberg stalled their project and launched his own site first.
This account suggests that the original idea and impetus for Facebook came from the Winklevoss twins and their partner, not Zuckerberg, though they failed to act on it quickly enough.
The Winklevoss and Narendra Lawsuit
The Accidental Billionaires’ account is based on a real-life lawsuit. In 2004, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra claimed that Mark Zuckerberg stole their ConnectU idea to create Facebook. They sued Zuckerberg for fraud, breach of contract, and misappropriation of trade secrets.
In 2008, they settled with Facebook and Zuckerberg for $65 million in cash and Facebook shares. However, they later sued again claiming they should have received more shares. In 2011, a judge ruled against their appeal.
So the Winklevoss twins and Narendra claimed Zuckerberg took their concept and insights to build his own knockoff version. But their legal efforts ultimately failed.
Analysis of the Competing Claims
Who’s right – the official history or the challengers? Based on the evidence, legal precedent, and accounts, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have the strongest case to be considered the original creator of Facebook for several reasons:
- He appears to have come up with the basic idea of connecting college students online through profiles.
- He designed and coded the initial version of Facebook himself in early 2004.
- Private messages between Zuckerberg and friends at the time, later obtained by Business Insider, confirm he had been working on his own social networking concept.
- While the Winklevoss/ConnectU idea may have given him motivation, the platform Zuckerberg created differed significantly in design and scope.
- He maintained leadership of Facebook from its launch up to the present.
Eduardo Saverin clearly had an important early role in providing funding and forming a company around Facebook. But he appears to not have been involved in coming up with the core idea or coding the first version. His comments mainly suggest he feels his contributions were downplayed, not that he invented Facebook itself.
The Winklevoss twins and Narendra don’t seem to have any substantive claim to actually inventing the ideas behind Facebook. At best, their concept provided some loose inspiration for Zuckerberg. But their legal efforts failed to prove he misappropriated their trade secrets or violated any contracts.
Conclusion
While the story contains some ambiguities and disputes, the weight of evidence suggests Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea, design, and code for Facebook as a college student in early 2004. Other participants like Eduardo Saverin and the HarvardConnection team contributed in different ways to the genesis of Facebook. But none appear to have a credible claim to being the central founder and inventor of the platform that revolutionized social media.
The Early History and Development of Facebook
Facebook has become one of the biggest internet companies in the world. But before Facebook became a household name and multi-billion dollar business, it had very humble beginnings in a college dorm room. Here is a deeper look at the early history and development of Facebook from its founding in 2004 up to its emergence as a major global company.
The Beginning: thefacebook.com
In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore computer science major at Harvard University. As a student, Zuckerberg had developed a reputation as a talented and ambitious programmer. According to early accounts, he created an instant messaging platform called ZuckNet when he was still in high school. At Harvard, he created CourseMatch, which helped students pick classes based on others’ course selections.
That year, Zuckerberg began developing a new program after hearing that a student publication was developing a website called Harvard Student Directory. It was to include basic biographical profiles of students. Zuckerberg realized he could create a better version faster, drawing on his programming chops.
By early 2004, Zuckerberg had lined up two fellow Harvard students to work with him – Eduardo Saverin, who put up some funding, and Dustin Moskovitz, who helped with the coding. Zuckerberg came up with the idea of connecting various college-based networks together and codeveloped what he initially called thefacebook.com.
The trio launched the site from Zuckerberg’s dorm room on February 4, 2004. It started off limited only to Harvard students, requiring a harvard.edu email address to join. The basic functions allowed users to create a profile with photo, interests, contact info, relationship status, groups, and more. Users could also browse for others and view their profiles.
Within the first month, over half of Harvard’s undergraduates had signed up. It quickly expanded to other Boston-area colleges. As it grew further, thefacebook.com enhanced features like photo tagging and groups.
Moving Beyond Harvard
By summer 2004 after his sophomore year, Zuckerberg had found success with thefacebook.com within Harvard. But he aimed to make it a platform spanning all universities. He took a leave from Harvard and relocated to Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California with Moskovitz and some other friends.
In 2005, thefacebook.com expanded to include 800 college networks at schools like Stanford, Columbia, and NYU. It later opened up to high school networks as well. Membership grew to over 5.5 million users by the end of 2005.
Some key developments happened for the company that year:
- The Thiel Foundation, co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, awarded Zuckerberg $500,000 to grow his company.
- In May, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in the company, making Zuckerberg able to hire more staff and open the first office.
- Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and some friends moved into a rental house in Palo Alto that became an office.
- In September, thefacebook.com dropped “the” from its name to become the sleeker “Facebook”
By the end of 2005, Facebook had 6 million users. Shortly after, high school networks were added. Facebook also introduced advertisements on the site for the first time, enabling it to generate revenue.
New Features and Expansion
In 2006, Facebook took steps toward becoming the platform recognized today. It opened up beyond educational institutions to become available to anyone with an email address. This helped boost the user base to 12 million.
Some other notable additions in 2006 included:
- The News Feed – an automated updated stream of friends’ activities.
- Open registration – allowing anyone to join.
- Work networks – users could now join networks based on companies and workplaces.
- Tagging friends in photos.
- Third-party developer access to the platform.
Facebook held its first Hackathon in summer 2006, where developers created applications like Photo Sense (identifying friends in photos) that introduced what would become the Facebook Platform. This enabled developers to create all kinds of apps and services that integrated with Facebook’s features.
By the end of 2006, Facebook had close to 13 million active users. While still dwarfed by the size of sites like MySpace at the time, Facebook was clearly on a rapid growth trajectory.
Becoming a Leading Social Media Platform
Over the next several years from 2007 to 2009, Facebook saw explosive growth that transformed it from a site for high school and college networks into a mainstream global social network.
Some key milestones included:
- Opening the platform beyond students to everyone 13 and older in 2006.
- Launching the Facebook Platform to let developers build apps in 2007.
- Allowing businesses to create pages on Facebook in 2007.
- Expanding internationally, with 70% of users outside the U.S. by 2009.
- Reaching over 200 million users by April 2009.
Facebook launched features like video sharing, Facebook Chat, and the Like button during these pivotal years. It also redesigned the site for a more modern look and feel. And the company reached key milestones like achieving profitability in 2009.
By 2010, Facebook had become the dominant social media platform, surpassing MySpace in popularity. And it has retained that leading position ever since.
Major Developments 2010 – Present
Facebook’sgrowth accelerated even more rapidly over the following decade from 2010 to the present. Here are some of the most notable developments:
- The number of users rose exponentially, reaching 1 billion in 2012 and 2 billion in 2017.
- Additional features like Timeline profiles, Graph Search, News Feed ads, and 360-degree photos were added.
- Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, followed by WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.
- Advertising revenue increased substantially, hitting over $85 billion in 2021.
- Facebook debuted hardware products like Oculus VR headsets and Portal video chat devices.
- The company rebranded as Meta in 2021 as part of a shift in focus to the metaverse.
Today, Facebook has around 2.9 billion monthly active users between Facebook itself, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It brought in revenue of $118 billion in 2021 and is valued at over $500 billion. While facing challenges around data privacy, misinformation, and other issues, it remains the biggest social network worldwide.
Conclusion
Facebook’s founding as a college-focused social site in 2004 marked just the beginning. Through rapid innovation and smart acquisitions, Facebook managed to expand its reach to billions of users around the world, becoming synonymous with social networking. Its profound impact on communication and culture continues to be felt today. And with its metaverse pivot, Facebook aims to once again transform the way its users interact online. While the future remains uncertain, the company’s next chapter promises to reveal even more about Facebook’s ambitious vision.