Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one of Harvard’s most famous 
dropouts, this week returned to the Ivy League school to pick up his 
degree – albeit only an honorary one – 12 years after quitting.
Mr
 Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in the world, also gave a 
commencement address to this year’s graduating class, praising students 
for accomplishing “something I never could”.
“If I get through this speech, it’ll be the first time I actually finish something at Harvard,” he said.
Mr
 Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dormitory room in 2014. The 
social network was initially limited to Harvard students only. It later 
expanded to other Ivy League universities, before being rolled out 
globally.
Earlier this week, Forbes magazine named Facebook the 
world’s fourth most valuable brand. Mr Zuckerberg is the world’s 
fifth-richest person, with an approximate fortune of $64.2bn, according 
to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In 2010, Time magazine named 
Mr Zuckerberg Person of the Year and Vanity Fair magazine listed him 
among its “top 100 most influential people of the information age”.
Like
 other tech entrepreneurs before him, Mr Zuckerberg has also become 
known as a philanthropist, pledging to direct tens of billions of 
dollars to a range of causes. He was studying computer science at 
Harvard before he moved to Palo Alto, in California, to run Facebook.
Bill
 Gates, currently the world’s richest human, dropped out of Harvard in 
1975, which was the same year he co-founded Microsoft. Mr Gates received
 his own honorary degree from Harvard back in 2007.
Dame Judi Dench and composer John Williams were among the 10 other recipients of honorary degrees from Harvard this week.

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