Time of his life
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has won Time magazine's annual Person of the Year accolade, beating WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and the Chilean miners to the award.
It has been quiet a year for Zuckerberg as Facebook's users topped 500 million this summer and he was even portrayed on the big screen in the Oscar nominated flick, The Social Network.
The arguably unflattering portrayal of Zuckerberg, (by actor Jesse Eisenberg who is nominated for a Golden Globe for his pithy performance) has obviously not dented his achievements.
The magazine wrote: "For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year."
The 26 year-old's meteoric rise to fame and fortune is legendary, and now 1 in 12 people across the globe have a Facebook account, collectively wiling away 700bn hours on the website each month. Time's epic profile delves into Zuckerberg's professional and private life- his girlfriend, charitable pursuits, views on the film, love of Star Wars and supposed indifference to money.
Zuckerberg is now worth more than Steve Jobs just five years after starting Facebook, and is now America's 35th richest person, worth around $6.9bn, according to Forbes.
He beat The Tea Party, Hamid Karzi, Julian Assange and the Chilean miners to The Time Person of the year award.
According to People magazine, Time has handed out its annual accolade since 1927 and winners include some of the world's most important, or at least notorious people from a clutch of presidents such as Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, both Bushes, Clinton and Obama to ‘American Women' and even Hitler who picked up the award in 1936.
Time has also collated a list of ‘People who Mattered' in 2010 from the sublime to the arguably ridiculous. They include: Ben Bernanke, Justin Bieber, Sandra Bullock, Pope Benedict, David Cameron, Lady Gaga, the cast of Glee, Kim Jong Un, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, the cast of Jersey Shore, Kanye West, Prince William and Kate Middleton plus ‘the unemployed American'.
