Mark Zuckerberg "After Becoming One of The Richest Men on The Planet"

(News Today) - He has already become one of the richest and most generous men on the planet. Now Mark Zuckerberg has gone one better and become the most influential of them all after being named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year.

The 26-year-old became the second-youngest person ever to receive the award due to the impact of Facebook, the social networking website he founded.

More than 500million people, or one in twelve of the world’s population, are now members to the point where it has ‘merged with the fabric of human life’, TIME’s editors say.

Facebook has such an incredible reach over human beings it now affects us ‘on a species-wide scale,’ they say.

In second place on the list was the Tea Party movement which has tightened its grip on American politics and helped turn the tide against Democrats in the U.S. mid-term elections.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was in third due to the US embassy cables which have caused a colossal diplomatic storm, followed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai despite lingering concerns he is ‘vain, incompetent and monumentally corrupt’, as TIME puts it.

Rounding off the winners were all 33 of the Chilean miners whose incredible tale of survival inspired the world.

In their awards, TIME’s editors write: ‘In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S.

‘If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale.’

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel added: ‘It’s something that is transforming the way we live our lives every day. It’s social engineering, changing the way we relate to each other.’

Time’s annual award is decided by the magazine’s editors for the person who ‘for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year’.

Previous winners have included Adolf Hitler in 1938, John F Kennedy in 1961, the computer in 1982 and Barack Obama in 2008.

Aviator Charles Lindbergh was named TIME’s very first Man of the Year back in 1927 when he was only 25, making him the youngest ever to receive the award.

The third-youngest was Queen Elizabeth back in 1952 when she was 26, the year she assumed the throne.

It has already been quite a year for Zuckerberg - according to Forbes magazine his fortune passed £4.4billion making him the 35th richest American, ahead of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Despite his youth he has also signed up to The Giving Pledge, a commitment by dozens of American billionaires to give away at last 50% of everything they own.

On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg wrote: ‘Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honour and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected.

‘I'm happy to be a part of that.’

In a separate poll readers of TIME had only put him at 10th most important behind Mr Assange in first place, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in second and Lady Gaga in third.

David Cameron had made the short list for Person of the Year but was not among those to make the final cut.

Source : kompas

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