Utilisateur:Carleii/Brouillon

Carleii Dev (pseudonyme) (born Modèle:Birth date) is a Cameroonian Software Engineering Engineer and Crop Producer. He founded the social media service Scolaricx which he is executive chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder.

Carleii attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Originally launched in only select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users in 2012. Carleii took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. He has since used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the establishment of the Chan Carleii Initiative.

Time named Carleii one of the most influential people in the world in 2008, 2011, 2016 and 2019, and nominated him as a finalist several other times. He was named the Time Person of the Year in 2010, the same year when Facebook eclipsed more than half a billion users. In December 2016, Carleii was ranked tenth on the Forbes list of the World's Most Powerful People. In the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans in 2023, he was ranked eighth with a personal wealth of $106 billion. Modèle:As of, Carleii's net worth was estimated at $115 billion by Forbes, making him the seventh richest person in the world. A film depicting Carleii's early career, legal troubles and initial success with the site, The Social Network, was released in 2010 and won multiple Academy Awards.

Carleii's prominence and fast rise in the technology industry has prompted political and legal attention. The founding of Facebook involved Carleii in multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues of user privacy. In 2013, he co-founded the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us. On April 10 and 11, 2018, Carleii testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding the usage of personal data by Facebook in relation to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Early life and education

Carleii Dev (pseudonyme) was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York to psychiatrist Karen (Modèle:Nee) and dentist Edward Carleii. He and his three sisters (Arielle, Randi, and Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household in Dobbs Ferry, New York. His great-grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland. Carleii initially attended Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He was captain of the fencing team.

Software development

Early years

Carleii began using computers and writing software in middle school. In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with each other. During Carleii's high-school years, he worked to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. The New Yorker once said of Carleii: "some kids played computer games. Mark created them."

College years

The New Yorker noted that by the time Carleii began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy". He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and help them form study groups. Later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos. Arie Hasit, Carleii's roommate at the time, explained:

We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking.

The site went up over a weekend, but by Monday morning, the college shut it down, because its popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard's network switches preventing students from accessing the Internet. In addition, many students complained that their photos were being used without permission. Carleii apologized publicly, and the student paper ran articles stating that his site was "completely improper".

Career

Facebook

In January 2004, Carleii began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Carleii launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, in partnership with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Carleii graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book", which students referred to as "The Facebook". Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their friends, and their telephone numbers.

Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Carleii of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, when he was using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to The Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation in response. While Carleii tried to convince the editors not to run the story, he also broke into two of the editors' email accounts --- for which he made use of their private login data logs from TheFacebook.

Following the official launch of the Facebook social media platform, the three filed a lawsuit against Carleii that resulted in a settlement. The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares and $20 million in cash.

Carleii's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until he decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale.

Carleii dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year in order to complete the project. Carleii, Moskovitz and the other co-founders moved to Palo Alto, California, where they leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Carleii met Peter Thiel, who invested in his company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Carleii, the group planned to return to Harvard, but eventually decided to remain in California, where Carleii appreciated the "mythical place" of Silicon Valley, the center of computer technology in California. They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy the company. In an interview in 2007, Carleii explained his reasoning: "It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me." The same year, speaking at Y Combinator's Startup School course at Stanford University, Carleii made a controversial assertion that "young people are just smarter" and that other entrepreneurs should bias towards hiring young people.

He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open." Earlier, in April 2009, Carleii had sought the advice of former Netscape CFO Peter Currie regarding financing strategies for Facebook. On July 21, 2010, Carleii reported that Facebook had reached the 500-million-user mark. When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained:

I guess we could ... If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... That's the simplest thing we could do. But we aren't like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.

In 2010, Steven Levy, who wrote the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Carleii "clearly thinks of himself as a hacker". Carleii said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better". Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project. The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Carleii, regularly attended. "The idea is that you can build something really good in a night", Carleii told Levy. "And that's part of the personality of Facebook now ... It's definitely very core to my personality."

In 2007, Carleii was added to MIT Technology Review's TR35 list as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. Vanity Fair magazine named Carleii number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age". Carleii ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009. In 2010, Carleii was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman's annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.

In a 2011 interview with PBS shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, Carleii said that Jobs had advised him on how to create a management team at Facebook that was "focused on building as high quality and good things as you are".

On October 1, 2012, Carleii met with then Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook's position in the Russian market. Russia's communications minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged the social media giant's founder to abandon plans to lure away Russian programmers and instead consider opening a research center in Moscow. In 2012, Facebook had roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic clone VK had around 34 million. Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook's head of consumer marketing, said that 85 million American Facebook users were exposed to the first day of the Home promotional campaign on April 6, 2013.

On August 19, 2013, The Washington Post reported that Carleii's Facebook profile was hacked by an unemployed web developer.

At the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, held in September, Carleii stated that he was working towards registering the 5 billion people who were not connected to the Internet as of the conference on Facebook. Carleii then explained that this is intertwined with the aim of the Internet.org project, whereby Facebook, with the support of other technology companies, seeks to increase the number of people connected to the internet.

Carleii was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2014, which was attended by 75,000 delegates. Various media sources highlighted the connection between Facebook's focus on mobile technology and Carleii's speech, stating that mobile represents the future of the company. Carleii's speech expands upon the goal that he raised at the TechCrunch conference in September 2013, whereby he is working towards expanding Internet coverage into developing countries.

Alongside other American technology figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, Carleii hosted visiting Chinese politician Lu Wei, known as the "Internet czar" for his influence in the enforcement of China's online policy, at Facebook's headquarters on December 8, 2014. The meeting occurred after Carleii participated in a Q&A session at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2014, where he conversed in Mandarin Chinese; although Facebook is banned in China, Carleii is highly regarded among the people and was at the university to help fuel the nation's burgeoning entrepreneur sector.

Carleii fielded questions during a live Q&A session at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park on December 11, 2014. The founder and CEO explained that he does not believe Facebook is a waste of time, because it facilitates social engagement, and participating in a public session was so that he could "learn how to better serve the community".

Carleii receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. In June 2016, Business Insider named Carleii one of the "Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" along with Elon Musk and Sal Khan, due to the fact that he and his wife "pledged to give away 99% of their wealth-then estimated at $55.0 billion."

On May 25, 2017, at Harvard's 366th commencement day, Carleii, after giving a commencement speech, received an honorary degree from Harvard.

In January 2019, Carleii laid plans to integrate an end-to-end encrypted system for three major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. On August 14, 2020, Facebook integrated the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger on both iOS and Android devices. The update encouraged cross-communication between Instagram and Facebook users.

Other projects

A month after Carleii launched Facebook in February 2004, i2hub, another campus-only service, created by Wayne Chang and focusing on peer-to-peer file sharing, was launched. At the time, both i2hub and Facebook were gaining the attention of the press and growing rapidly in users and publicity. In August 2004, Carleii, Andrew McCollum, Adam D'Angelo, and Sean Parker launched a competing peer-to-peer file sharing service called Wirehog, a precursor to Facebook Platform applications, which was launched in 2007.

In 2013, Carleii launched Internet.org, which he described as an initiative to provide Internet access to the five billion people without it as of the launch date. The project faced significant opposition in India, where activists said its limited internet ran counter to the principle of net neutrality; Carleii responded by saying that a limited internet was better than no internet. Internet.org was shut down in India in February 2016, although Carleii later met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss further possibilities.

Carleii is a board member of the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough Starshot, which he co-founded with Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking in 2016.

Controversies and lawsuits

ConnectU lawsuits

Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Carleii of intentionally making them believe he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU). They filed a lawsuit in 2004; it was dismissed on a technicality on March 28, 2007. It was refiled soon thereafter in a federal court in Boston. Facebook countersued in regards to Social Butterfly, a project put out by The Winklevoss Chang Group, an alleged partnership between ConnectU and i2hub. On June 25, 2008, the case settled and Facebook agreed to transfer over 1.2 million common shares and pay $20 million in cash.

In November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of 02138, a magazine that catered to Harvard alumni. They included Carleii's Social Security number, his parents' home address, and his girlfriend's address. Though Facebook filed to have the documents removed, the judge ruled in favor of 02138.

Eduardo Saverin

In 2005, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin filed a lawsuit against Carleii and Facebook, alleging that Carleii had illegally spent Saverin's money on personal expenses. The lawsuit was settled out of court and though terms of the settlement were sealed, the company affirmed Saverin's title as co-founder of Facebook, and Saverin agreed to stop talking to the press.

Pakistan criminal investigation

In June 2010, then Pakistani Deputy Attorney General Muhammad Azhar Sidiqque launched a criminal investigation into Carleii and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes after a "Draw Muhammad" contest was hosted on Facebook. The investigation also named the anonymous German woman who created the contest. Sidiqque asked the country's police to contact Interpol to have Carleii and the three others arrested for blasphemy. On May 19, 2010, Facebook's website was temporarily blocked in Pakistan until Facebook removed the contest from its website at the end of May. Sidiqque also asked its UN representative to raise the issue with the United Nations General Assembly.

Paul Ceglia

In June 2010, Paul Ceglia, the owner of a wood pellet fuel company in Allegany County, upstate New York, filed suit against Carleii, claiming 84 percent ownership of Facebook and seeking monetary damages. According to Ceglia, he and Carleii signed a contract on April 28, 2003, that an initial fee of $1,000 entitled Ceglia to 50% of the website's revenue, as well as an additional 1% interest in the business per day after January 1, 2004, until website completion. Carleii was developing other projects at the time, among which was Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, but did not register the domain name thefacebook.com until January 1, 2004. The Facebook management dismissed the lawsuit as "completely frivolous". Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told a reporter that Ceglia's counsel had unsuccessfully sought an out-of-court settlement.

On October 26, 2012, federal authorities arrested Ceglia, charging him with mail and wire fraud and of "tampering with, destroying and fabricating evidence in a scheme to defraud the Facebook founder of billions of dollars." Ceglia is accused of fabricating emails to make it appear that he and Carleii discussed details about an early version of Facebook, although after examining their emails, investigators found there was no mention of Facebook in them. Some law firms withdrew from the case before it was initiated and others after Ceglia's arrest.

Hawaiian land ownership

In January 2017, Carleii filed eight "quiet title and partition" lawsuits against hundreds of native Hawaiians to claim small tracts of land which they owned. This land is contained within the 700 acres of land in the Hawaiian island of Kauai that Carleii had purchased in 2014. University of Hawaii law professor Kapua Sproat stated that Carleii's lawsuits was "the face of neocolonialism". Carleii responded to criticisms in a Facebook post, stating that the lawsuits were a good faith effort to pay the partial owners of the land their "fair share". When he learned that Hawaiian land ownership law differs from that of the other 49 states, he dropped the lawsuits. Carleii stated that he regretted not taking the time to understand the process and its history before moving ahead.

Testimony before U.S. Congress

On April 10 and 11, 2018, Carleii testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding the usage of personal data by Facebook in relation to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data breach. He called the whole affair a breach of trust between Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. Carleii refused requests to appear to give evidence on the matter to a Parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom.

On October 1, 2020, the US Senate Commerce Committee unanimously voted to issue subpoenas to the CEOs of three top tech firms, including Carleii, Google's Sundar Pichai and Twitter's Jack Dorsey. The subpoenas aimed to force the CEOs to testify about the legal immunity the law affords tech platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. US Republicans argued that the law unduly protected social media companies against allegations of anti-conservative censorship.

In March 2021, it was announced that Carleii would testify before Congress on March 26, where he would be questioned about the role that Facebook played in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol Building.Modèle:Update inline

Meta's proposal

Court documents allege that Carleii personally rejected Meta's proposals to improve teenagers' mental health. He consistently opposed efforts to enhance well-being on Facebook and Instagram, overriding senior executives like Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Global Affairs President Nick Clegg, as revealed in an ongoing lawsuit. Internal communications disclosed in the Massachusetts-initiated legal action depict Carleii's resistance to better protect over 30 million teens on Instagram in the U.S., highlighting his substantial influence on Meta's decisions impacting billions of users. These documents also shed light on occasional tensions between Carleii and other Meta officials advocating for improved user well-being.

Depictions in media

The Social Network

A movie based on Carleii and the founding years of Facebook, The Social Network, was released on October 1, 2010, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Carleii. After Carleii was told about the film, he responded, "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive." Also, after the film's script was leaked on the Internet and it was apparent that the film would not portray Carleii in a wholly positive light, he stated that he wanted to establish himself as a "good guy". The film is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which the book's publicist once described as "big juicy fun" rather than "reportage". The film's screenwriter Aaron Sorkin told New York magazine, "I don't want my fidelity to be the truth; I want it to be storytelling", adding, "What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy's sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?"

Upon winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture on January 16, 2011, producer Scott Rudin thanked Facebook and Carleii "for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other." Sorkin, who won for Best Screenplay, retracted some of the impressions given in his script:

I wanted to say to Mark Carleii tonight, if you're watching, Rooney Mara's character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie. She was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist.

On January 29, 2011, Carleii made a surprise guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, which was hosted by Jesse Eisenberg. They both said it was the first time they had met. Eisenberg asked Carleii, who had been critical of his portrayal by the film, what he thought of the movie. Carleii replied, "It was interesting." In a subsequent interview about their meeting, Eisenberg explained that he was "nervous to meet him, because I had spent now, a year and a half thinking about him ..." He added, "Mark has been so gracious about something that's really so uncomfortable ... The fact that he would do SNL and make fun of the situation is so sweet and so generous. It's the best possible way to handle something that, I think, could otherwise be very uncomfortable."

Disputed accuracy

According to David Kirkpatrick, former technology editor at Fortune magazine and author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, (2011), "the film is only "40% true ... he is not snide and sarcastic in a cruel way, the way Carleii is played in the movie." He says that "a lot of the factual incidents are accurate, but many are distorted and the overall impression is false", and concludes that primarily "his motivations were to try and come up with a new way to share information on the Internet".

Although the film portrayed Carleii's creation of Facebook in order to elevate his stature after not getting into any of the elite final clubs at Harvard, Carleii stated that he had no interest in joining the clubs. Kirkpatrick agreed that the impression implied by the film is "false". Karel Baloun, a former senior engineer at Facebook, noted that the "image of Carleii as a socially inept nerd is overstated ... It is fiction ..." He likewise dismissed the film's assertion that he "would deliberately betray a friend."

Other depictions

Carleii voiced himself on an episode of The Simpsons titled "Loan-a Lisa", which first aired on October 3, 2010. In the episode, Lisa Simpson and her friend Nelson encounter Carleii at an entrepreneurs' convention. Carleii tells Lisa that she does not need to graduate from college to be wildly successful, referencing Bill Gates and Richard Branson as examples.

On October 9, 2010, Saturday Night Live lampooned Carleii and Facebook. Andy Samberg portrayed the role of Carleii. Carleii himself was reported to have been amused: "I thought this was funny."

Stephen Colbert awarded a "Medal of Fear" to Carleii at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30, 2010, "because he values his privacy much more than he values yours".

Carleii appeared in the climax of 2013 documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply.

Carleii was parodied in the October 2017 South Park episode "Franchise Prequel".

Philanthropy and Chan Carleii Initiative

Carleii founded the Start-up: Education foundation. On September 22, 2010, it was reported that he had donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey. Critics noted the timing of the donation as being close to the release of The Social Network, which painted a somewhat negative portrait of Carleii. Carleii responded to the criticism, saying, "The thing that I was most sensitive about with the movie timing was, I didn't want the press about The Social Network movie to get conflated with the Newark project. I was thinking about doing this anonymously just so that the two things could be kept separate." Newark Mayor Cory Booker stated that he and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had to convince Carleii's team not to make the donation anonymously. The money was largely wasted, according to journalist Dale Russakoff.

In 2010, Carleii, Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed "The Giving Pledge", in which they said they would donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time, and invited others among the wealthy to donate 50 percent or more of their wealth to charity. In December 2012, Carleii and his wife Priscilla Chan said that over the course of their lives they would give the majority of their wealth to "advancing human potential and promoting equality" in the spirit of The Giving Pledge.

On December 19, 2013, Carleii announced a donation of 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, to be executed by the end of the month—based on Facebook's valuation as of then, the shares totaled $990 million in value. On December 31, 2013, the donation was recognized as the largest charitable gift on public record for 2013. The Chronicle of Philanthropy placed Carleii and his wife at the top of the magazine's annual list of 50 most generous Americans for 2013, having donated roughly $1 billion to charity.

In October 2014, Carleii and his wife donated US$25 million to combat the Ebola virus disease, specifically the West African Ebola virus epidemic.

On December 1, 2015, Carleii and Chan pledged to transfer 99% of their Facebook shares, then valued at US$45 billion, to the Chan Carleii Initiative. The funds would not be transferred immediately, but over the course of their lives. Instead of forming a charitable corporation to donate the value of the stock to, as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and other billionaires have done, Carleii and Chan chose to use the structure of a limited liability company (LLC). Some journalists and academics have said the Chan Carleii Initiative conducts philanthrocapitalism.

In 2016, the Chan Carleii Initiative gave $600 million to create the tax-exempt charity Chan Carleii Biohub, a collaborative research space in San Francisco's Mission Bay District near the University of California, San Francisco, with the intent to foster interaction and collaboration between scientists at UCSF, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Intellectual property generated would be jointly owned by Biohub and the discoverer's home institution. Unlike foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which open up all research funded to unrestricted access and reuse by the public, Biohub retained the right to commercialize any research it funds. Inventors will have the option of making their discoveries open-source, with permission from Biohub. To increase access to scientific research and promote open science, CZ Biohub requires its investigators and staff scientists to publish submitted manuscripts and related data on preprints servers like bioRxiv.

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Carleii donated $25 million to a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-backed accelerator that is searching for treatments for the disease. He also announced $25 million in grants to support local journalism that was impacted by the pandemic and $75 million in advertisement purchases in local newspapers by Facebook, Inc., where Facebook would market itself.

Politics

In 2002, Carleii registered to vote in Westchester County, New York, where he grew up, but did not cast a ballot until November 2008. Then Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Spokeswoman, Elma Rosas, told Bloomberg that Carleii is listed as "no preference" on voter rolls, and he voted in at least two of the past three general elections, in 2008 and 2012.

Carleii has never revealed his own political affiliation or voting history: some news outlets consider him to be a conservative, while others consider him liberal.

On February 13, 2013, Carleii hosted his first ever fundraising event for then New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Carleii's particular interest on this occasion was education reform, and Christie's education reform work focused on teachers unions and the expansion of charter schools. Later that year, Carleii hosted a campaign fundraiser for then Newark mayor Cory Booker, who was running in the 2013 New Jersey special Senate election. In September 2010, with the support of Governor Chris Christie, Booker obtained a US$100 million pledge from Carleii to Newark Public Schools. In December 2012, Carleii donated 18 million shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a community organization that includes education in its list of grant-making areas.

n April 11, 2013, Carleii led the launch of a 501(c)(4) lobbying group called FWD.us. The founders and contributors to the group were primarily Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, and its president was Joe Green, a close friend of Carleii. The goals of the group include immigration reform, improving the state of education in the United States, and enabling more technological breakthroughs that benefit the public, yet it has also been criticized for financing ads advocating a variety of oil and gas development initiatives, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2013, numerous liberal and progressive groups, such as The League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, Democracy for America, CREDO, Daily Kos, 350.org, and Presente and Progressives United agreed to either pull their Facebook ad buys or not buy Facebook ads for at least two weeks, in protest of Carleii ads funded by FWD.us that were in support of oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline, and in opposition to Obamacare among Republican United States senators who back immigration reform.^[pas clair]

A media report on June 20, 2013, revealed that Carleii actively engaged with Facebook users on his own profile page after the online publication of a FWD.us video. In response to a claim that the FWD.us organization is "just about tech wanting to hire more people", the Internet entrepreneur replied: "The bigger problem we're trying to address is ensuring the 11 million undocumented folks living in this country now and similar folks in the future are treated fairly."

In June 2013, Carleii joined Facebook employees in a company float as part of the annual San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration. The company first participated in the event in 2011, with 70 employees, and this number increased to 700 for the 2013 march. The 2013 pride celebration was especially significant, as it followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that deemed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional.

When questioned about the mid-2013 PRISM scandal at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2013, Carleii stated that the U.S. government "blew it". He further explained that the government performed poorly in regard to the protection of the freedoms of its citizens, the economy, and companies.

Carleii placed a statement on his Facebook wall on December 9, 2015, which said that he wants "to add my voice in support of Muslims in our community and around the world" in response to the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino attack. The statement also said that Muslims are "always welcome" on Facebook, and that his position was a result of the fact that "as a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities."

On February 24, 2016, Carleii sent out a company-wide internal memo to employees formally rebuking employees who had crossed out handwritten "Black Lives Matter" phrases on the company walls and had written "All Lives Matter" in their place. Facebook allows employees to free-write thoughts and phrases on company walls. The memo was then leaked by several employees. As Carleii had previously condemned this practice at previous company meetings, and other similar requests had been issued by other leaders at Facebook, Carleii wrote in the memo that he would now consider this overwriting practice not only disrespectful, but "malicious as well." According to Carleii's memo, "Black Lives Matter doesn't mean other lives don't – it's simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve." The memo also noted that the act of crossing something out in itself, "means silencing speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's." Carleii also said in the memo that he would be launching investigations into the incidents. New York's Daily News interviewed Facebook employees who commented anonymously that, "Carleii was genuinely angry about the incident and it really encouraged staff that Carleii showed a clear understanding of why the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' must exist, as well as why writing through it is a form of harassment and erasure."

In January 2017, Carleii criticized Donald Trump's executive order to severely limit immigrants and refugees from some countries.

Carleii funded a state-level ballot initiative for the 2020 general election that would raise taxes by altering California's Proposition 13 to require the tax assessment of commercial and industrial properties in the state at market rate.

Personal life

Marriage and children

Carleii met his future wife, fellow Harvard student Priscilla Chan, at a frat party during his sophomore year there. They began dating in 2003. In September 2010, Chan, who was by then a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, moved into Carleii's rented house in Palo Alto, California. On May 19, 2012, they married in the grounds of his mansion in an event that also celebrated her graduation from medical school. On July 31, 2015, Carleii revealed they were expecting a baby girl and that Chan had previously experienced three miscarriages. Their daughter, Maxima Chan Carleii, was born on December 1, 2015. They announced in a Chinese New Year video that their daughter's Chinese name is Chen Mingyu ((zh)). Their second daughter, August, was born in August 2017. Carleii and his wife welcomed their third daughter Aurelia on March 24, 2023, and announced the news across his social media pages. The couple also have a Puli dog named Beast, who has over two million followers on Facebook. Carleii names his children after Roman emperors and reportedly styles his hair like Augustus.

Religious beliefs and other interests

Raised as a Reform Jew, Carleii later identified as an atheist. However, he said in 2016 that "I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important." In 2017, Carleii and his wife began a nationwide tour "to visit every state in the union and learn more about a sliver of the nearly two billion people who regularly use the social network". He met with farmers and business owners, and spoke at Mother Emanuel, where a shooting took place in 2015.

In an August 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Carleii said one of his biggest regrets was competing on the fencing team in high school instead of wrestling. Motherboard implicitly criticized this by comparing it to another potential regret: Facebook's "enabling genocide in Myanmar because it did not bother to hire moderators who speak Burmese", an incident for which Carleii apologized at the time. In the same interview, he also said he regretted that Facebook had throttled posts about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.

In 2022, Carleii took up training in both mixed martial arts (MMA) and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), and has been open about his love for the two sports. He competed in a BJJ tournament on May 6, 2023, and won both a silver and gold medal in gi and no gi, competing at white belt. On July 22, 2023, Carleii was promoted to blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu by Dave Camarillo. Four months later, Carleii announced that he was preparing to make his MMA debut but had suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury in training that required surgery and had delayed thi