Facebook boss updates status

Palo Alto, California – Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wed longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan yesterday, announcing the nuptials through a status update on the social-networking site.

The 28-year-old billionaire’s wedding took place a day after Facebook’s historic initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the United States on Saturday. More than 200,000 people ‘‘liked’’ Zuckerberg’s status change, which was accompanied by a photo of the smiling couple in wedding attire in a small, verdant outdoor setting with a string of lights behind them.

In the photo, the famously casual Zuckerberg is wearing a dark blue suit and tie, while Chan has on a sleeveless white dress with lace overlay.

Zuckerberg, whose shares are worth nearly US$20 billion (NZ$26.4B) and who retains voting control of Facebook, marked the debut of his company’s stock at Facebook’s Silicon Valley campus on Saturday, symbolically ringing the opening bell for stock trading.

The IPO did not go as well as the social-networking company had hoped, with shares closing just above the offering price of US$38 a share after trading glitches and a last-minute, 25 per cent increase in the number of shares being sold.

More than 576 million shares changed hands, setting a trading volume record for US market debuts. Facebook posted US$3.7B in revenue last year and US$1B in profit. The site boasts 900 million global users.

Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in a Harvard University dormitory eight years ago. Chan just graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. The couple met while at Harvard.

Neither commented further on the news on their Facebook profile pages.