mark zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he let go of nearly $500 million today by donating it to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

This nonprofit foundation focuses on grant giving to serve the community in the San Francisco peninsula. Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post today that he, his wife, Priscilla Chan, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation will work together to "look for areas in education and health to focus on."

The hefty sum of cash comes as a gift of 18 million Facebook shares, which is valued at more than $498 million, based on the social … Read more

News of Instagram's revised terms of services agreement, which essentially allows the company to use your photos for advertising, have caused user backlash, but none so comical as the stir caused by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister.

Arielle Zuckerberg, who works for Google social-media marketing division Wildfire, hit her "Like" button today on an Instagram photo posted to Facebook by Instagram user and professional photographer Clayton Cubitt. The photo was a screenshot of a portion of the new terms of service, with a caption that read, "Instagram's suicide note."

The new terms, which … Read more

The people have spoken -- just not enough of them to have an impact on Facebook's business or future.

First, there are the yeas versus the nays. In the voting on the giant social network's proposed policy changes, 589,141 users (87.5 percent) opposed the changes, and 79,731 were in support. But then there's the threshold: according to Facebook's voting laws, an enforceable verdict required participation by 30 percent (300 million) of Facebook's billion users. The total vote count of 668,872 was just 0.0668 percent of potential voters.

Now Facebook can … Read more

2012 was a year Mark Zuckerberg will remember vividly -- and not just because he turned 28 and married his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. The year will go down as the one in which Zuckerberg came out from under his hoodie and began to prove his talents as a leader of one of the titans of consumer tech. His rock-star persona helped as he wooed Wall Street and pulled off the biggest Internet IPO in history, raising $16 billion. But we all know what happened next: The stock cratered and Zuckerberg quickly went from idol to villain -- at least … Read more

Wielding both wealth and influence, Bill Gates is the world's fourth most powerful person, as ranked by Forbes.

Rising to fourth place from fifth last year, Gates was cited by Forbes for his vast fortune. The Microsoft co-founder is worth $65 billion even after donating more than $28 billion toward various causes.

But it's also his mission and his influence that make Gates a powerful man.

As co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he's been on a quest to stamp out a variety of diseases around the world. As Forbes notes, Gates estimates that the … Read more

You've heard it said countless times: A picture's worth a thousand words.

If you think that's not at least as true online as it is offline, you haven't been paying attention to the explosive machinations in the war for digital real estate going on in Silicon Valley over the last year or so.

Today, the tech world is all worked up over the latest in the slow-moving war of attrition between Instagram and Twitter. By cutting off Twitter Card integration, Instagram is hoping to wean its users off Twitter.

This is a seismic event, especially with … Read more

In an effort to make billions of dollars by suing Facebook, Paul Ceglia is actually putting a large dent in his own wallet.

Federal Magistrate Leslie Foschio ordered Ceglia to pay the social network almost $90,000 in attorney fees today, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The order comes because of Ceglia's last-minute cancellation of legal depositions that Facebook had already paid its lawyers to do. Foschio also ordered Ceglia to reimburse an additional $7,000 in travel and lodging expenses for the social network's experts that were to be deposed.

Ceglia is suing Facebook with the … Read more

If Facebook had a tagline for this stage in its evolution, it would be "Made for people by Mark." It flows out of the mission statement -- "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" -- and the co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's iron grip on where Facebook is heading. It also drives Facebook's effort to design stuff, including ads, that its billion-plus customers will really "like," and share with their friends. And, it helps keep the legion of Facebook engineers from getting preoccupied with innovations that … Read more

One big question looming over Facebook's stock: How many insiders are going to start dumping their shares?

After more than five months of watching their holdings sink, most employees and early Facebook investors can start cashing in their pre-IPO stock as the so-called lockups expire. Not all at once, however, but the key dates are coming fast and one, in fact, just passed (though the markets were closed because of Sandy). By the end of the year, Facebook's float -- that's the stock that's available to trade in the open market -- will increase by more … Read more