45 Things You Probably Didn't Know about Mark Zuckerberg

Today is Facebook's 10 year anniversary. In celebration, we look at the life of its founder and billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg.

1. His full name is Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and he was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York into a comfortable, well-educated family.

2. Mark Zuckerberg is half Bulgarian and he was named after his grandfather Bulgarian - Marco on his maternal line. His grandfather had emigrated from Bulgaria to ship in 1940s of the last century.

3. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice which was attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children-Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

4. Zuckerberg's interest in programming developed when his parents gifted him the book C++ for Dummies.

5. He built a product called ZuckNet, just for his family. His father was able to send an instant message to anyone in the house and visa versa. It was, essentially, an early version of AOL's Instant Messenger.

6. He already got job offers when he was still in high school. Both AOL and Microsoft tried to recruit him after he created Synapse, a program that used artificial intelligence to learn users' music-listening habits.

7. On his application to Harvard University, he listed French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek as languages he could read and write.

8. While studying at the Harvard university Mark Zuckerberg, a psychology sophomore, developed "Facemash," a website that asked users to judge students' attractiveness based on their dorm-directory photos.

9. He also created Course Match, a program that enabled students/users to decide what college courses they wanted to opt for based on what other students at their school were choosing.

10. On February 4 2004, Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook.com, a social network that allowed users to create basic profiles including personal information and photos. Initially, Facebook was supposed to be a networking site for university grads, but was thrown open for everybody in 2006.

11. Mark co-founded Facebook with three other college roommates and fellow students: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Saverin was the one who offered up $1,000 capital money to get the company started.

12. He was accused of cheating: Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narenya sent Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter, accusing him of independently developing thefacebook.com while he was hired to work on their social networking project, HarvardConnection. According to promotional material later published by ConnectU's lawyers, Facebook settled with the founders of "ConnectU", the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, for a purported $65 million.

13. Zuckerberg's first car was a Subaru Forester SUV.

14. Facebook is blue because Zuckerberg is red-green color blind. "Blue is the richest color for me. I can see all of blue," he told ABC News.

15. Zuckerberg considers himself an atheist.

16. Zuckerberg's programmed his own trick into Facebook. If you type @[4:0] in the Facebook comment box, Mark Zuckerberg's name will appear.

17. You can't block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. Go to https://www.facebook.com/zuck and try for yourself.

18. In Facebook's early days, he used to hand out business cards that reads: "I'm CEO, B****".

19. He is very focused and likes his team to also be that way. If someone got hungry and wanted to go out for fast food, "Mark would, like, pound the table and just say, 'No! We're in lockdown! No one leaves the table until we're done with this thing," said an employee.

20. He began dating Priscilla Chan in 2003. She's from Boston and the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees.

21. Chan was among the first few people to join Facebook, on February 5, 2004 (the day after it was launched).

22. In an interview with The New Yorker, Chan said that the couple met while waiting in line for the bathroom at a party hosted by Mr Zuckerberg's fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi.

23. In October 2010, Zuckerberg took a bunch of Facebook staffers to a public theater to see "The Social Network," the movie about the founding of Facebook. In public comments afterward, he criticized the film's portrayal of him as someone who invented Facebook to gain social status.

24. In September 2010, Zuckerberg invited Chan, who was medical student at the University of California, San Francisco at the time, to move into his rented Palo Alto house. Before moving in, she gave him a "Relationship Contract" which stated "One date per week, a minimum of a hundred minutes of alone time, not in his apartment and definitely not at Facebook."

25. Before meeting Chan's family in China in December 201, he studied Mandarin.

26. He designed his wife's Priscilla Chan's wedding ring, which is a ruby flanked on either side by diamonds. The ring is reportedly worth $25,000, even though he was worth about $19 billion at the time.

27. The couple got married on May 19, 2012 in the backyard of the newlyweds' Palo Alto, Calif., home.

28. The wedding was small and intimate with less than 100 guests who snacked on Mexican and Japanese food from the couple's favourite local restaurants; Palo Alto Sol and Fuki Sushi. The Mexican meals were valued at a modest $7.50 each. Dessert was a selection of mice-shaped chocolate from Burdick Chocolate priced at just over $3 each. It was a sweet the couple had eaten on their first date.

29. He is the first person under 30 to make one of the nation's largest philanthropic gift. In 2013, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan gave 18 million shares of Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

30. He wears the same gray Facebook T-shirt almost every day because he's busy and it saves him time in the morning.

31. He has been a vegetarian since 2011 and once said he will only eat meat if he has killed the animal himself.

32. He owns a Hungarian sheepdog named Beast, who has a Facebook page with 1.5 million fans.

33. His favorite musicians include Daft Punk and Lady Gaga.

34. Zuckerberg lists "Ender's Game" as one of his favorite books.

35. According to a report in Business Insider, Zuckerberg doesn't own a TV.

36. What's his car of choice? Zuckerberg drives a black Acura TSX and says "it's safe, comfortable, not ostentatious."

37. He really liked Andy Samberg's impression of him on SNL. "Andy Samberg plays me on SNL. I'm a big Andy Samberg fan so I thought this was funny," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook Timeline. Samberg later reprised his Zuck impression for f8, the social network's developer conference.

38. By July 2011, Zuckerberg became the most-followed user on Google's social network Google+, overtaking Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

39. He lists Albert Einstein's "Make things as simple as possible but no simpler" as one of his favourite quotations.

40. His friends call him "Zuck" and his mother calls him "Princely."

41. Zuckerberg is on Twitter as @finkd where he has over 150,000 followers but has posted only 19 tweets in the last three and a half years.

42. Zuckerberg has about 50 patents in his name.

43. His net worth is $19.8 billion.

44. What advice does he have to offer? "All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program."

45. "The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.