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Mark Zuckerberg says the 'most important thing' he built at Harvard was a prank website: 'Without Facemash I wouldn't have met Priscilla'

Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO, has revealed that the most significant creation from his time at Harvard University wasn't the precursor to a global social network, but a prank website that nearly got him expelled. In a 2017 commencement address at his alma mater, Zuckerberg said that Facemash, the controversial site he created in 2003, was "the most important thing I built in my time here" for one simple reason: it led him to his wife, Priscilla Chan.

"Without Facemash I wouldn't have met Priscilla, and she's the most important person in my life," Zuckerberg said during the speech. The Meta CEO was then a sophomore at Harvard when he created Facemash by hacking into the university's online student directories and using the photos to create a site where users could rank students' attractiveness.

The site went viral, but it was quickly shut down by the university. Zuckerberg was called before Harvard's Administrative Board, facing accusations of breaching security, violating copyrights, and infringing on 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 threw me a going-away party."

It was at this party, thrown by friends who believed his expulsion was imminent, where he met Chan, another Harvard undergraduate. The two locked eyes in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all-time romantic lines, Zuckerberg said: "I'm going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly."

Chan, who described her now-husband to The New Yorker as "this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there," went on the date with him. Zuckerberg did not get expelled from Harvard after all, but he did famously drop out the following year to focus on building Facebook.

While the 2010 film The Social Network portrayed Facemash as a critical stepping stone to the creation of Facebook, Zuckerberg himself has downplayed its technical or conceptual importance. "And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn't," he said during his commencement speech.

But he did confirm that the series of events set in motion by Facemash—the administrative hearing, the "going-away" party, the line for the bathroom—ultimately connected him with the mother of his three children. Chan went on to graduate from Harvard in 2007, taught science, and then attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, becoming a pediatrician.

She and Zuckerberg got married in 2012, and in 2015, they co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization focused on leveraging technology to address major world challenges in health, education, and science. Chan serves as co-CEO of the initiative, which has pledged to give away 99% of the couple's shares in Meta Platforms to fund its work.

Watch the entirety of Zuckerberg's Harvard commencement speech below:

This story was written with the assistance of generative AI, and an editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.