Meet the second-youngest individual ever to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of the omnipresent social-networking site Facebook.
“It’s something that is transforming the way we live our lives every day,” Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel said as he announced the magazine’s 2010 selection live on TODAY Wednesday. “It’s social engineering, changing the way we relate to each other.”
If you regularly use a computer and interact even minimally with Facebook, you may feel as though you already know the 26-year-old Zuckerberg. And maybe you’ve seen the acclaimed movie “The Social Network,” which portrays Zuckerberg as socially stunted, calculating and arrogant. But Stengel told TODAY’s Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira that there’s more to the multibillionaire CEO.
“He’s very affable, he’s in the moment, he’s quick-witted,” Stengel said, but “he has this thing when he gets on camera” and becomes suddenly shy.
More about People Meet a modern-day ‘Brady Bunch’ Former call girl now escorts hookers to Jesus Amanda Knox: My heart is ‘broken’ TODAY ‘instrumental’ in Facebook predator arrest Prince William, Kate to get marital counseling Stengel said Zuckerberg stands out for accomplishing something that’s never been done before: connecting millions of people and mapping the social relations among them.
“This year they passed 500 million users — one in 10 people on the planet,” Stengel said.
“He’s our second-youngest Person of the Year,” Stengel added; only Charles Lindbergh, named the magazine’s very first Man of the Year back in 1927 when he was 25, was younger. “He’s deeply affected by it.”
Images: Time Persons of the Year 1999-2010 (on this page)
In his in-depth profile of Facebook’s co-founder, Time’s Lev Grossman writes that “Zuckerberg is a warm presence, not a cold one. He has a quick smile and doesn’t shy away from eye contact. He thinks fast and talks fast, but he wants you to keep up. He exudes not anger or social anxiety but a weird calm. When you talk to his co-workers, they’re so adamant in their avowals of affection for him and their insistence that you not misconstrue his oddness that you get the impression it’s not just because they want to keep their jobs. People really like him.”
What about Chilean miners? Tea Party?
The decision to name Zuckerberg Person of the Year followed weeks of debate and discussion among Time editors and staff members. Here are others Time considered:
Looking back
Time editors stress that being named Person of the Year is not an honor. In fact, their definition of the designation goes like this: “The person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”
The magazine has picked a Person of the Year each year since 1927. Here is a look back at just some of them:
1930: Mohandas Gandhi
1938: Adolf Hitler
1939: Joseph Stalin
1940: Winston Churchill
1941: Franklin D. Roosevelt
1952: Queen Elizabeth II
1961: John F. Kennedy
1963: Martin Luther King Jr.
1966: 25-and-under generation
1971: Richard M. Nixon
1975: American women
1976: Jimmy Carter
1979: Ayatollah Khomeini
1980: Ronald Reagan
1982: The computer
1989: Mikhail Gorbachev
1992: Bill Clinton
1994: Pope John Paul II
2000: George W. Bush
2001: Rudolph Giuliani
2006: You
2007: Vladimir Putin
2008: Barack Obama
Advertisement | ad infoThe magazine’s No. 2 runner-up after Zuckerberg was the Tea Party, a loose affiliation of American citizens united by their dislike of big government.
No. 3: Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks organization has shared reams of sensitive diplomatic cables with the world. Referring to a poll of Time readers as to who should have been chosen, Stengel told Lauer and Vieira: “Assange won our poll by a great margin — but of course, Lady Gaga was No. 2. We take all that into account.”
No. 4: Hamid Karzai, the elected leader of the volatile nation of Afghanistan.
No. 5: The Chilean miners, who were trapped half a mile underground for more than two months. Stengel told Lauer and Vieira that “we have photographs of every Chilean miner” in their issue.
Visit Time.com | View an interactive map of previous winners
Another contender was Steve Jobs, the Apple Inc. co-founder and chief executive who in 2010 launched the iPad, which quickly became the gadget of the year. Apple also surpassed Microsoft as the most highly valued technology company this year.
Thousands of TODAY viewers voted on their picks for Person of the Year and made decidedly different decisions.
Viewers’ top choice was the Chilean miners, who garnered 44 percent of the vote; the second pick was the Tea Party, which got 20 percent. Of viewers who participated, 19 percent voted for Zuckerberg.
TODAY viewers wanted Chilean miners to win Time title
In the end, Time’s decision rested on Zuckerberg’s — and Facebook’s — incredible reach over human beings “on a species-wide scale.”
The numbers are staggering: Nearly one out of every 10 people on the planet uses Facebook, and the site handles 1.7 billion interactions a minute. Almost 1 million new people sign up for Facebook every single day
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