Overruling an overwhelming vote by its readers for arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Facebook co-founder Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was on Wednesday named as the Person of the Year by the Time magazine for “transforming” the way people connect around the world.
Zuckerberg beat out WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Assange, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Chilean miners to become the Person of the Year 2010 by the prestigious magazine. He joins the long annual list of eminent persons Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, which was started by the Time magazine in 1927.
Managing editor Richard Stengel said Zuckerberg’s Facebook was “transforming the way we live our lives every day.”
“Being named as Time Person of the Year is a real honour and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that,” Zuckerberg said. —PTI