Facebook’s forgotten founders: where are they now?

Over twenty years ago, five Harvard students created Facebook. And though we can’t stop hearing about Mark Zuckerberg, even today, most people don’t know much about its other four founders.

If it weren’t for David Fincher's successful film 'The Social Network' (2010), lots of people still wouldn’t know there were other founders besides Zuckerberg.

Photo: The Social Network - Columbia TriStar Pictures

Zuckerberg’s four forgotten co-founders are Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. Eventually, all of them ended up leaving the company, but, where did they go?

It is worth noting that, besides being the CEO of Meta, the company who now owns Facebook, Zuckerberg is married to Priscilla Chan with whom he has three daughters, and has also built up muscle by practising MMA and boxing. But let’s back up a bit.

It all began with Facemash, a program created by Zuckerberg in which users could vote on the attractiveness of people based on two photos and thus create a beauty ranking. The program was blocked by Harvard University but it was the seed of what would become Facebook.

The original Facebook was all about connecting people at Harvard, and that's where Zuckerberg's roommate and economics student Dustin Moskovitz (pictured, left) came in to help him get users. He soon dropped out of school to focus on Facebook.

The project soon expanded beyond Harvard and the entrepreneurs registered the domain 'thefacebook.com', becoming a company in June 2004.

Dustin Moskovitz (pictured) rose to become the company's CTO and was responsible for recruiting its first employees, but in 2008, with Facebook doubling the number of users on MySpace, he decided to leave the company and help found Asana alongside Justin Rosenstein, with whom he led Facebook's engineering team.

In just four years, Moskovitz became the world's youngest billionaire and today he has an estimated fortune of 15.6 billion dollars. Despite this, he has a simple taste and uses a bike to move around San Francisco, where he has established his residence.

Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield in the movie, (pictured, right, alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake), was the one who provided the initial capital to Facebook ($1,000 + $18,000), but in 2005 he abruptly left the company.

There are many questions about the agreement reached between Zuckerberg and Saverin, but it is known that Saverin moved to Singapore and in less than two decades has become the richest man in the country.

Eduardo Saverin became a venture capitalist and backer of startups, while boasting luxury and exclusivity throughout Singapore, with an estimated net worth of $32.4 billion, according to Forbes.

Andrew McCollum, a classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s, was responsible for designing Facebook's first web interface. Like Dustin Moskovitz, he also dropped out of school to focus on developing Facebook.

However, in 2006 he left the company and, after a few years, he also made the leap into venture investment, betting on around thirty startups and in 2014 he founded Philo, an on-demand content service.

Finally, there’s Chris Hughes, the only one who did not drop out of Harvard and finished his degree in Art History and Literature in 2006, before returning to the company as a spokesman for a while. In 2007 he left Facebook to join Barack Obama's campaign team.

In 2012, he bought the New Republic, a well-known progressive political and cultural magazine, which he had to sell in 2016 due to the constant losses it was generating. Today, according to Forbes, he has a net worth of 430 million dollars.

And so, the estranged five Facebook founders continue to go their separate ways with one important thing in common: they’re all multimillionaires.

Never miss a story! Click here to follow The Daily Digest.