15 quotes reveal Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's story

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of five co-founders of the social networking site Facebook.

Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of Facebook, Inc. His personal wealth is estimated to be $9.4 billion as of 2012.

Let's take a look at 15 quotes that define his life and business.

Source: Business Insider

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"Calm down. Breathe. We hear you."

He said this when Facebook users started getting angry over the News Feed.

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"I don't know why ...they 'trust me' ...dumb idiots"

He said this in the early days of Facebook when people started sharing their personal information on the site.

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"When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don't want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren't. There are pranks, IMs. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use."

This was his response to the previous comment where he called users idiots.

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"I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded."

He said this in relation to the movie, Social Network.

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"Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are."

Here he is talking about Facebook.

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"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users."

Here he is talking about Beacon, an ad network that published what users were doing outside of Facebook on their News Feed.

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"Anything that involves content or specific expertise in an area - games, music, movies, TV, news, anything in media, anything e-commerce, any of this stuff. Over the next five years, those verticals are going to be completely re-thought. There are going to be some really good businesses built."

He said this while talking about Facebook's future.

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"The idea of the social graph is that if you mapped out all the connections between people in the world it would form this graph, and that's what we're doing at Facebook. Once you've done that, you can start building services on them and enable this broader platform, build games, etc. A lot of people have characterized the social graph as something that we own or control, but we don't."

Here he is explaining the "social graph", which is one of the defining Facebook concepts.

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"Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something."

Here he is talking about Facebook's IPO.

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"It doesn't help. But look, Facebook has not been an uncontroversial company in the past. This is not the first up and down we've had."

He said this after Facebook's stock flopped in the public markets.

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"This week I got an iPhone. This weekend I got four chargers so I can keep it charged everywhere I go and a land line so I can actually make phone calls."

This quote reveals how Zuckerberg, who was more into BlackBerrys, underestimated iPhone and native apps would be for mobile.

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"It's one of the biggest mistakes, if not the biggest strategic mistake we made. We're coming out of that."

He said this while talking about not doing native mobile apps.

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"We're not going to build a phone. It's not the right strategy for us to build one integrated system... Let's say we sell 10 million units - that would be one per cent of users. Who cares for us?"

Here he is denying rumours that Facebook plans to launch its own mobile phone.

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"When people are writing nice stuff about us, it's important to get in front of the company and say, 'Don't believe all this'. When they write negative stuff, it's important to get in front of the company and say, 'Don't believe all this'."

Here he is revealing his strategy to play down both good and bad news.

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"I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do."

What he is saying here is that people shouldn't blindly commit to doing something.