Facebook shareholders want Mark Zuckerberg removed: Interesting facts and major acquisitions

Facebook shareholders seek change.

| Published: Wednesday, February 8, 2017, 11:50 [IST]

Facebook is reportedly being persuaded by the shareholders in order to remove the founder Mark Zuckerberg from the company's board of directors. Going by a VentureBeat report, they have filed a proposal to replace Zuckerberg, a member of the board since 2012.

Facebook shareholders want Mark Zuckerberg removed

The shareholders are seeking an independent chairperson who can carry forward the company with better pro-shareholder agenda and corporate governance. This idea seems to have been initiated by SumOfUs, a watchdog group of shareholders. This is an online group that holds the companies accountable for issues such as discrimination, worker rights, etc.

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The report further added that 333,000 people have already signed the petition to replace Zuckerberg with an independent chairperson. Of these, 1,500 were the shareholders in the company.

Notably, this petition filed by SumOfUs is hardly going to have any impact on Mark Zuckerberg as he has a considerable amount of shares and plays a major role in decision making. Now, we have listed some of the interesting facts about Mark Zuckerberg and a few major acquisitions made by Facebook in the past.

Facts about Mark Zuckerberg

Talking about the facts about Mark Zuckerberg, it is known that he is a Harvard University dropout as he wanted to pursue his dream of launching Facebook that initially debuted as Thefacebook. Apart from this, he had started programming when he was pretty young itself. He was named a prodigy by his tutor, David Newman, a developer.

While at Harvard, Zuckerberg built a website called Facemash that used online photos from the college's Houses and users were asked to choose the ones they thought were hotter. This created a backlash and Zuckerberg was banned from accessing the internet at Harvard. He was also accused by breaching security and privacy.

Apart from these, there are many such interesting facts about the founder and CEO of Facebook. He has faced many legal battles in the past few years. One lawsuit was filed by his twins regarding the idea of Facebook and he was asked to settle $65 million to them in 2009.

Initial acquisitions by Facebook

Initially, Facebook acquired a small startup, Parakey for an undisclosed amount in 2007. Later, in 2009, the firm acquired FriendFeed for $47.5 million. FriendFeed was a social media feed aggregator and Facebook copied many features of the same such as News Feed and Like button. Facebook went on acquiring FB.com, Divvyshot, Chai Labs, Beluga, Face.com, etc.

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Brave steps taken by Facebook

In 2012, Facebook made its most famous purchase back then by acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. This was the largest acquisition made by Facebook at that time.

The other major acquisition made by Facebook was in 2014. In fact, until today, this is the largest acquisition made by Facebook valued at $19 billion. Undoubtedly, the talk is about WhatsApp. Despite criticism regarding overpaying for the free service, the platform managed to gain access to a larger user base, especially in the overseas market.