JOIN USZuckerberg, 26, beat out WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Assange, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Chilean miners to become the ‘Person of the Year 2010’ by the prestigious magazine.
He joins the long annual list of eminent persons Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, which was started by the Time magazine in 1927.
Managing editor Richard Stengel said Zuckerberg’s Facebook was “transforming the way we live our lives every day.” The youngest billionaire in the world is also philanthropist who, this year, has given millions of dollars to charity.
“For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we all live our lives,” the magazine said, describing the spread of Facebook since Zuckerberg created it just seven years ago when he was a 19-year-old student at Harvard. “Being named as Time ‘Person of the Year’ is a real honour and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I am happy to be a part of that,” Zuckerberg said.