Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.(SABC)
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Facebook co-founder and CEO 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 initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday.
More than 280 000 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, a departure from his trademark "hoodie," while Chan has on a sleeveless white dress with lace overlay. Both are smiling for the camera.
Zuckerberg, whose shares are worth nearly $20 billion and who retains voting control of Facebook, marked the debut of his company's stock at Facebook's Silicon Valley campus on Friday, 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 $38 a share after trading glitches and a last-minute, 25 % 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 $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011 and $1 billion in profit. The site boasts 900 million global users.
Facebook's emergence as a cultural phenomenon was depicted in the fictionalized 2010 film "The Social Network."
Zuckerberg, Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2010, started Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room eight years ago, before dropping out of the Ivy League school. Chan just graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. The couple met while at Harvard.
Neither Zuckerberg nor Chan commented further about their marriage on their Facebook pages. The couple adopted a Hungarian sheepdog named Beast a year ago and live together in Palo Alto, California.
