Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Talks to Diane Sawyer as Website Gets 500-Millionth Member
July 21, 2010— -- If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest one in the world. But on the day that the massive social network achieved its most significant milestone yet – crossing the 500 million member mark – the site's young CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that it's the users who deserve all the credit.
"It's really the people themselves who have gotten us to this state. I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today," Zuckerberg told ABC News' Diane Sawyer today.
In an interview at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters, Zuckerberg said the journey from his Harvard dorm room to his new Silicon Valley digs has been "surreal."
When he started the site with some classmates six years ago, the site, then called "The Face Book," was only intended to connect students on one college campus. Since then, it's grown into a global force that is redefining relationships of every kind – from the personal to the political to the commercial and beyond.
"Well, what I think it's doing is giving everyone a voice, right?" he said. "So, back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn't have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard."
But though Facebook is a transformative company, it has also been mired in myth and legal melodrama.
This fall, a new movie, "The Social Network," plans to give viewers a glimpse of Facebook's earliest days.
Trailers for the film sugest a steamy story about the site and its founders, but Zuckerberg said the truth isn't nearly as intriguing.
"I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time," he said. "I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded."
Zuckerberg said that though he has no plans to see the movie, he'd seen a part of a trailer. He said it's "interesting," but called the movie and other false reports "distractions."
