Web mogul Mark Zuckerberg has become the second-youngest individual ever to be named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year.
TIME’s annual Person of the Year honor goes to the person — or thing — that has most influenced the culture and the news during the past year, whether it be for good or for ill. The founder and CEO of the world’s leading social networking website, Facebook, succeeds Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who received the honor last year. The 2008 winner was then-President-elect Barack Obama. The 2007 winner was Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Other previous winners have included Bono, President George W. Bush, and Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.
At 26, Zuckerberg has put himself on the map as one of the world’s youngest billionaires and a prominent newcomer to the world of philanthropy. Earlier this year, the Harvard dropout pledged $100 million over five years to the Newark, New Jersey school system. Now, he’s in the company of media titans Carl Icahn, 74, Barry Diller, 68, 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.
“Connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them,” TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel says of the mag’s decision. “The social networking platform he invented … is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third-largest country on earth, and probably holds more information than any government about its citizens. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head-of-state.”
