Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 17, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
“We founded Facebook because we firmly believe that our communications platform will do the world a service,” the 23-year-old tells VANITY FAIR. “That is a longer-term task. To implement it properly, it certainly does not help to sell the company at the first opportunity or take the company public as quickly as possible.”
Facebook recently made headlines because Microsoft founder Bill Gates had allegedly offered Zuckerberg 500 million dollars for a five-percent stake in the company. According to this, Facebook as a whole would be worth ten billion dollars and thus the most valuable Internet company since Google. According to his own statements, Zuckerberg does not think at all about the value of his website and the potential wealth associated with it. “I really do not think about something like that,” he says. “You do not wake up one day and think: Hmm, okay, now the site is worth ten billion dollars.”
Mark Zuckerberg founded the social-networking site Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard University in 2004 and later dropped out of his studies to devote himself entirely to the company. Meanwhile, 47 million people use the site’s services. So far, Facebook is available only in English is. Zuckerberg, however, wants to
change this: “We are working on it at full speed. I hope that we will become multilingual at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.”
You can read the entire interview in the current issue of VANITY FAIR.
