Among the deluge of Facebook articles currently in circulation, two are particularly interesting for their distinct focus on the man behind it all: twenty-seven-year-old Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, of White Plains, New York (at this stage, his saga certainly deserves some historicizing). The first, written by Somini Sengupta, appears in the New York Times; the second in the Los Angeles Times, and is written by perennial tech-beat savant Nathaniel Olivarez-Giles.
Sengupta highlights the degree of control that Zuckerberg has managed to retain at this significant stage of maturation for Facebook; as the company heads into its colossal IPO, Le Zuck holds approximately 60 percent of his company’s shares as well as three out of five board chairs — that means he has an almost unprecedented amount of control over a company of such proportions. Sengupta also discusses the important role former-Facebook president Sean Parker had in advising and guiding Zuckerberg to such levels of company power.
Olivarez-Giles shares that starting January 1, 2013, the person behind “frictionless sharing” will be paid only $1 dollar per year for his work as company CEO. Zuckerberg’s salary for 2012 is expected to be $600,000, but it’s unlikely he’ll be missing the six-figure salary since his personal fortune is about to rocket into the eleven-figure range, and the new token salary is a tradition among ultra-rich leaders — the late Steve Jobs from Apple, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and even Google CEO Larry Page have all received that loneliest of numbers as their base annual salary.
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