Facebook Founder Zuckerberg Named Time Person of Year

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook Inc., was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” today for “creating a new system of exchanging information” and “changing how we all live our lives.”

Zuckerberg, 26, began the world’s largest social-networking site in 2004. >>>

 The service, with more than 500 million users, has helped people connect with each other and changed definitions of privacy, Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel said in a letter on the magazine’s website.

Zuckerberg created Facebook for college students when he was a sophomore at Harvard University. After opening the site up to people outside of higher education, the company surpassed News Corp.’s MySpace as the No. 1 social network two years ago. Facebook users now post a billion pieces of content, such as photos and messages, every day, Time said.

“There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another,” Stengel said. “More than anyone else on the world stage, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is at the center of those changes.”

Zuckerberg is tied for No. 35 on the 2010 list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, according to Forbes magazine. His wealth jumped 245 percent to $6.9 billion, the largest percentage increase on its annual list, the magazine said.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, lets users share information about themselves and communicate with “friends.” About 70 percent of the site’s users are outside of the U.S.

‘The Social Network’

Facebook is valued at $43.1 billion by SharesPost Inc., an exchange for closely held companies. That makes it the third- largest U.S. Web business, underscoring the growing allure of social media for investors. Zuckerberg said this month that selling shares in the company was a possibility, without offering details or a timetable.

The company has faced legal challenges, including a suit from brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Harvard students who said they hired Zuckerberg to write code for a dating and social-networking site before he started Facebook. The Winklevosses settled for $65 million in 2008.

A movie about Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook, “The Social Network,” was released on Oct. 1 and was nominated for six Golden Globe awards yesterday.

The company has also faced privacy concerns from legislators in Washington and the European Union looking at the way Facebook and other websites, such as Google Inc., use and store user information. The company has tweaked privacy options on subscribers’ accounts and reduced the amount of publicly available user information in response.

Past Winners

Zuckerberg is a year older than Time’s first person of the year, Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. Time, owned by Time Warner Inc., started the annual selection in 1927.

Runners-up for “Person of the Year” were the Tea Party movement, an upstart political group; Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan; Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, a website that publishes classified documents; and the Chilean miners, a group of 33 men who were trapped in a mine for more than two months.

Other candidates for the accolade were talk-show commentator Glenn Beck, singer Lady Gaga, and Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs.

Last year’s winner was Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. The magazine selected President Barack Obama in 2008. Previous winners include former President Bill Clinton, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, China’s Deng Xiaoping and, in 1982, the Computer.

--With assistance from Sara Forden in Washington. Editors: Ville Heiskanen, Peter Elstrom
To contact the reporter on this story: Amy Thomson in New York at athomson6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net