Mark Zuckerberg has found himself in the news once more. On this Thursday’s episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the co-founder of Facebook revealed that the FBI had approached the social media company warning about “Russian propaganda” surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

During the 2020 presidential elections, Facebook had throttled the reportage of a story involving the current president, Joe Biden’s son and a number of transactions made abroad. In the same interview with podcaster and UFC commentator Joe Rogan, the 38-year-old defended Facebook’s actions, saying that the process the company followed was “pretty reasonable.”

Who is Mark Zuckerberg?

Born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the co-founders of Facebook as well as its parent company Meta Platforms. 

The media magnate is best known for his creation of Facebook, which began as a social networking site limited to Harvard, where he was studying at the time. Facebook was officially launched in 2004 and was originally designed for select college campuses. Zuckerberg dropped out in 2005 to build the company full time. Soon after, its popularity grew and the site began to expand rapidly, to the point that it had reached one billion users by 2012. 

Since then, Facebook has morphed into a giant social media company that has often been in the news because of its questionable business practices. In the past ten years or so, the company has made a number of high profile acquisitions like WhatsApp and Instagram to name a few. More recently, Meta’s aggressive acquisition strategy has landed the company in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission. In 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation regarding the use of users’ personal data in relation to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In 2020, Zuckerberg, along with the CEOs of other Big Tech companies like Google and Twitter, were subpoenaed by the US Senate Commerce Committee to testify about the legal immunity that was afforded to tech companies thanks to a part of the Communications Act. 

Zuckerberg has been married to his Harvard classmate Priscilla Chan since 2012 and the couple have two daughters, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg, who was born in 2015 and August, who was born in 2017.

The story of Facebook and Zuckerberg were also the subject of a film, The Social Network, which was based on the tech billionaire and the founding years of his company. Actor Jesse Eisenberg played the role of Zuckerberg.