Update: Yesterday, Microsoft agreed to pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, a deal that places a $15 billion valuation on the start-up. Facebook has received a total of $278.20M in funding.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is one of the youngest web celebrities, who, as a Harvard College student, founded the online social networking website Facebook with the help of fellow Harvard student and computer science major Andrew McCollum as well as roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. He now serves as Facebook’s CEO.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. He was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating his projects. An early project, Coursematch, allowed students to view lists of other students enrolled in the same classes. A later project, Facemash.com, was a Harvard-specific image rating site similar to Hot or Not. A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg’s Internet access was revoked by administration officials. The computer services department brought Zuckerberg before the Harvard University Administrative Board, where he was charged with breaching computer security and violating rules on Internet privacy and intellectual property.

The school alleged that Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard house websites to harvest images of students without their permission, for profit. Zuckerberg stated that he thought that information should be free and publicly available. The action taken by the board, if any, was not made public. In 2004, Zuckerberg created Facebook and took a leave of absence from the college. A year later he dropped out.

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