Meet the First Lady of Social Media
Those who are faithful readers of this blog know that we are not prone to trivialities.
But in a week that saw Facebook go public and Zuckerberg get married, we just had to wonder what stories lay quiet in the backwaters… And there we found 27-year-old Priscilla Chan.
Born in the Boston suburb of Braintree, MA, Chan attended Quincy High School, where she graduated as valedictorian. Fortuitously (and that word could not be used more appropriately) Chan matriculated Harvard University, where she met Zuckerberg while waiting in line to use the bathroom at his Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.
After graduating from Harvard – Mark, of course, dropped out – Priscilla spent a year teaching 4th and 5th graders, before enrolling at University of California, San Francisco, where she earned her degree in pediatrics, graduating, ironically, on Zuckerberg’s 28th birthday.
Priscilla and Mark (sounds homey, doesn’t it?) have an eighteen-month-old Hungarian sheepdog named Beast. Beast, of course, has his own Facebook page. A self-proclaimed public figure, Beast headlines his page by saying, “I am a Puli, which is a type of Hungarian Sheepdog. I live in Palo Alto with Mark and Cilla. I like cuddling and herding things.”
And there’s plenty to cuddle with at the Chan-Zuckerberg estate. We can call it that, since California is a community property state. Half of Zuckerberg’s salary is now Chan’s. Of course, that means that half of his losses are hers, too – unless they had a prenuptial agreement stating otherwise. (That may be less of a joke than you thought, as Forbes’ “Real-Time Billionaires” tracker shows Zuckerberg losing $2.12 Billion in Facebook value since the IPO.)
Chan’s influence on the Facebook empire has already begun. In May of this year, inspired by its first-lady-to-be, the social networking giant entered the world of organ donations, by allowing users to sign up on the site. Sure it seems a little freaky, but this is Facebook.
And oh, just in case you were stuck on that $2 Billion loss, The Zuck is still worth about $17 Billion, in Facebook terms alone.
