Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg marks marriage with status update

FACEBOOK founder Mark Zuckerberg has updated his profile status to “married” after netting more than £700 million from one of the biggest stock market floatations in history.

His new status drew more than 700,000 “likes” from users of the site after he wed his long-term girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, 27, the day after the much hyped launch of the company into the Nasdaq stock exchange that left Mr Zuckerberg worth about £12 billion.

Ms Chan had graduated from medical school at the University of California San Francisco, on Monday, the same day as Mr Zuckerberg turned 28, making the wedding at his California home the climax of a busy week.

The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years.

The ceremony took place in Mr Zuckerberg’s back yard, before fewer than 100 guests, who all thought they were there to celebrate Ms Chan’s graduation.

A company spokeswoman said Mr Zuckerberg designed the ring, featuring “a very simple ruby”.

In a wedding picture posted on Facebook of the couple, Mr Zuckerberg is seen wearing a dark blue suit and tie – very different from his customary hoodie, which he donned a day earlier to ring the opening bell of Nasdaq, remotely from Facebook’s headquarters in California.

The couple reportedly met while queuing for the toilet at a Harvard University party.

They dated on and off, but maintained a relationship as Facebook took off.

Despite the volume of personal information Facebook encourages users to share, the firm’s CEO is rarely interviewed and few details are known about their private lives together.

It was only a year ago that Mr Zuckerberg even confirmed the pairing by changing his status to “in a relationship”.

The couple’s Hungarian sheepdog Beast, who is pictured with Ms Chan on her online profile, has his own Facebook page, with more than half a million fans.

Mr Zuckerberg’s relationships were dramatised in the film The Social Network, but the accuracy of those details were disputed.

On Friday, a firm known for staging high-end weddings, fund-raisers, and corporate events, was seen at Mr Zuckerberg’s five-bedroom home in Palo Alto.

Friday’s stock market floatation initially saw shares jump 13 per cent from their $38 (£24) opener, before falling back just above their starting point by the end of the day.

Even after the first release of shares for Facebook, which has been estimated to be worth more than £63bn, Mr Zuckerberg remains Facebook’s single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. And he controls the company with 56 per cent of its voting stock.

The site, born in a Harvard dorm room eight years ago, has grown into a worldwide network of almost a billion people.

Mr Zuckerberg was named as Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2010, at the age of 26.

Profile

Born on 14 May, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Eliot Zuckerberg was the son of a psychiatrist and a dentist. He and his three sisters grew up in nearby Dobbs Ferry.

He started working with computers at a young age and launched a first version of Facebook called Facemash, while at Harvard. He went on to found Facebook in 2004 and moved to Palo Alto, California, the same year. According to his Facebook profile, he is a vegetarian and has registered as an organ donor. In a rare interview in 2010, he said: “The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.”