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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