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Zuckerberg named Time’s Person of the Year

Facebook founder chosen for ‘connecting more than half a billion people’

Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of Facebook and the world’s youngest billionaire, is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010. The announcement was made Wednesday by Time’s managing editor, Rick Stengel, on NBC’s Today show.

The magazine said Zuckerberg was chosen “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 subject of the critically acclaimed, controversial, and—according to Zuckerberg himself—fictionalized biopic “The Social Network” beat out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Tea Party organization and the rescued Chilean miners for this year’s title.

Only one person younger then Zuckerberg has ever won the acclamation—aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, who was named the first person of the year in 1927, when he was 25.

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