With a fortune of $17.5billion in their family they could easily afford to retire.
But rather than take the easy way out Mark Zuckerberg’s mother and father are still running the same dental business they did before Facebook was founded.
Every weekday Ed Zuckerberg sees patients in the treatment room of his $600,000 home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, whilst wife Donna runs the office.
Committed: Ed Zuckerberg (front left) has no plans to retire from running his dental business which he describes as his ‘baby’
Known as ‘Painless Dr Z’, Ed Zuckerberg founded the business in 1978 but refuses to retire because his career is his ‘baby’ – just like his son’s is to him.
In an interview with New York magazine, the Zuckerbergs revealed that like their son they are thrifty and do not flash their cash around.
Mark Zuckerberg was famously once dubbed ‘the poorest rich person I’ve ever seen in my life’, living like a student in rented houses even though he was worth billions.
His family home has remained the same for decades, with little furniture, a small kitchen and the only obvious luxury a row of theatre style seats in front of a big TV.
Ed Zuckerberg has also not touched the two million shares in Facebook his son gave him as a thank you for helping him set up the business, a gift he initially refused by eventually accepted.
MEET THE ZUCKERBERGS
Parents Ed and Donna Zuckerberg run the same dental practice they opened in 1978 with no plans to retire.
Sister Arielle Zuckerberg is a product manager for San Francisco based marketing firm Wildfire Interactive
A second sister, Donna, runs a food blog and is going a PhD at Princeton
The final sibling, Randi, married to collegesweetheart Brent Tworetzky with a baby named Asher and is making a reality TV show about the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene.
They are now worth around $60million.
Ed Zuckerberg said that even though Mark had done well, he did not really know what he had done so right as a parent.
He said: ‘You have successful kids, and people are going to want to emulate your formula. But we don’t profess any special child-rearing skills.
‘The best I can say is that as parents, you can engineer the life you want your kids to have, but it may not be the life they want to have.
‘You have to encourage them to pursue their passions. And you have to spend more time on them than you spend on anything else.’
Mark Zuckerberg’s success can in part be put down to a similar combination of hard work and thrift – he reportedly regularly pulled all nighters and kept his engineers up all night doing coding until the sun came up.
