What Happened: Cuban made the lighthearted remark on the Lex Fridman Podcast, while revealing the secrets to becoming a billionaire.
Zuckerberg, who has been writing code since middle school, came up with the idea to create a website that hosted photos of his fellow college mates at Harvard University.
Initially called “Facemash,” the idea was that website visitors had to choose who was “hotter” among two people, based on their photos. It was shut down within days after overwhelming Harvard’s network, but Zuckerberg improvised on this to create Facebook two years later.
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At its core, Facebook was a photo directory for Harvard students. It was based on books called “Face Books,” which had names and pictures of students who lived in dorms.
Zuckerberg connected this to the internet and allowed Harvard students to sign up and submit their photos. It soon spread to other universities and then to the wider internet eventually.
While Cuban joked that Zuckerberg was “just trying to get laid,” he added that the timing of Facebook was a lucky coincidence since prices of computers had fallen off a cliff after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.
“Kids in school all needed computers or laptops. If he had tried to do something like that five years earlier… He was too young, but five years earlier or five years later, or Friendster might’ve been the ultimate or MySpace…”
The Secrets To Success: Apart from the lucky timing and money, Zuckerberg had another advantage – proximity.
“If Zuck wasn’t at Harvard and he was at Miami of Ohio University or he was at Richland Community College, same idea, same person, same execution, and nothing [would have happened].”
Three months in, Zuckerberg has seen his net worth rise by a staggering $44.6 billion to $173 billion, making him the fourth richest person in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He has beaten Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang as well, even as the semiconductor designer has been leading the AI chips market unopposed.
Zuckerberg plans to have around 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of this year to boost Meta’s AI efforts. He has also increased his focus on achieving the much-hyped state of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, taking on Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI.
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