Facebook’s Zuckerberg caps IPO week with wedding
SAN FRANCISCO – What a week! Mark Zuckerberg may never have another one like it.
The Facebook co-founder turned 28 years old, raised $16 billion as he took his company public and capped it all off by marrying his long-time girlfriend, Priscilla Chan.
Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, changed his own relationship status to “married” on Saturday after tying the knot with Chan in a low-key ceremony at his home in Palo Alto, California.
Zuckerberg posted a wedding picture with his bride on his Facebook page.
“Mark added a life event to May 19, 2012 on his timeline: Married Priscilla Chan,” was the description accompanying a shot of the bride in white and the groom — famous for his attachment to casual clothes — in a dark suit and tie.
More than 810,000 people had “liked” Zuckerberg’s wedding picture by Sunday afternoon and hundreds had sent congratulations.
“Sweeter than the IPO. A lifetime of blessings to you,” posted Facebook user Cary Dawson Tilds.
“What a lovely milestone week you have had, this is the week that will go down in Mark Zuckerberg History!” wrote Jennifer Ruys Gill.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, 100 guests attended the surprise wedding — they believed they had been invited to a party to celebrate Chan’s graduation from medical school.
The newspaper said Zuckerberg gave Chan a ruby ring which he designed himself and the guests dined on sushi from a Palo Alto restaurant.
Zuckerberg turned 28 on Monday, the same day as Chan, 27, graduated from the University of California at San Francisco with a degree in pediatrics.
The couple met at Harvard, where Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his dorm room in 2004 with three other classmates.
Zuckerberg famously dropped out of Harvard to move to California to expand Facebook but Chan graduated from the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university in 2007 with a degree in biology.
According to her Facebook page, Chan taught science to 4th and 5th graders at The Harker School in 2007 and 2008 before going back to school to study medicine.
On Friday, Zuckerberg, wearing his trademark hooded sweatshirt, remotely rang the bell from Facebook headquarters to kick off trading on the Nasdaq stock market.
Facebook shares were listed at $38 but closed the day barely above the starting price after a glitch-plagued market debut that failed to live up to the enormous pre-IPO hype.
Facebook shares eked out a gain of just 0.61 percent to end at $38.23 amid record volume of more than 575 million shares traded.
The IPO gave Facebook a dizzying valuation of $104 billion, putting it ahead of other high-tech giants such as Amazon ($96 billion) and Cisco ($89 billion).
The IPO was also carefully structured to keep control of Facebook in the hands of Zuckerberg, who has been Time’s “Person of the Year” and cracked the Forbes list of 20 richest people in the world.
