For Mark Zuckerberg, the most significant creation of his two years at Harvard University was not the embryo of a global social network, but a controversial website that almost led to his expulsion.
Meta’s CEO said in a 2017 commencement speech at Harvard that the controversial site, Facemash, was “the most important thing I’ve built in my time here” for one simple reason: It led to him meeting his wife, Priscilla Chan.
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“Without Facemash I would not have met Priscilla, and she is the most important person in my life,” Zuckerberg said during the speech.
In 2003, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, created Facemash by hacking Harvard’s online student directories and using the photos to set up a website where users could rank students’ attractiveness levels.
The site went viral, but was quickly taken down by the university. Zuckerberg was summoned before the Harvard Board of Trustees, accused of security breaches, copyright infringement and invasion of individual privacy.
“Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out,” Zuckerberg recalled in his speech. “My parents came to help me pack. My friends organized a going-away party for me.”
It was at this party, organized by friends who believed his expulsion was imminent, that he met Priscilla, another Harvard student. “We met in line for the bathroom at the Pfoho Belltower, and in what has to be one of the most unlikely romantic phrases of all time, I said, ‘I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to set up a quick date,’” Zuckerberg said.
Priscilla, who described her now husband to The New Yorker magazine as “this nerdy guy who was just a little out of the ordinary”, agreed to go out with him. Zuckerberg wasn’t expelled from Harvard in the end, but he dropped out the following year to focus on building Facebook.
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While the 2010 film The Social Network portrayed Facemash as a crucial step towards the creation of Facebook, Zuckerberg himself downplayed its technical or conceptual importance.
“And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was super important in creating Facebook. It wasn’t,” he said during his commencement speech. But he confirmed that the sequence of events he triggered — the administrative hearing, the farewell party, the bathroom line — ended up connecting him to the mother of his three children.
Priscilla, in turn, graduated from Harvard in 2007, taught science and then studied medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, becoming a pediatrician.
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She and Zuckerberg married in 2012, and in 2015 they co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization dedicated to using technology to address major global challenges in health, education and science.
Priscilla serves as co-CEO of the initiative, which has committed to donating 99% of the couple’s shares in Meta Platforms to finance their projects.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor checked the information for accuracy before publication.
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