The story of how one of the most famous tech billionaires met his wife sounds like the script of a romantic comedy, yet it is absolutely true, free of pathos, and has been confirmed many times over by the people involved.
Harvard, 2003 year
Mark and Priscilla met in 2003 at an ordinary student party at Harvard University. At the time, their life trajectories seemed utterly different. Priscilla Chan, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, was a senior, a straight-A student and class president who was steadily working toward a career in medicine. Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore programmer who happened to be on academic probation and facing expulsion from the university after the scandal over the creation of the Facemash website.
An Unexpected Beginning
According to Zuckerberg's own recollections, they met in the most prosaic of places: they ended up in the same line for the bathroom at that very party. To break the awkward tension, Mark deployed his trademark self-deprecating humor. He later recounted that he walked up to Priscilla and said something along the lines of: "I'm going to get kicked out of Harvard in three days, so we'd better go on a date quickly."
A Union of Opposites
Despite the joking start, they were brought together by something more than a chance encounter. Priscilla later admitted that she was drawn to Mark's intellect and his unconventional way of thinking, while Mark always called her "the most important person" he met at Harvard. They began spending time together studying: Priscilla helped Mark with some of his humanities courses, and he, in turn, shared his ambitious ideas about technology and social networks.
A Relationship Without Show
Their romance developed long before Facebook turned Mark into one of the richest people on the planet. They deliberately avoided publicity and kept their closeness even during the most intense periods of the company's rise. In 2012, nine years after they met, they married in a modest private ceremony in the backyard of their home in Palo Alto, rather than at the lavish wedding the tabloids had expected. An interesting fact -- the guests thought they had come to celebrate Priscilla's graduation from medical school and were surprised to learn they had come to a wedding.
Today their union is not only a strong family (the couple has three daughters) but also a powerful partnership in the field of global philanthropy. Together they founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, directing billions of dollars toward the advancement of science, education and medicine, proving that their Harvard love story has grown into something far greater than just a beautiful romantic plot.
