How Andrew Bosworth, Mark Zuckerberg’s old teaching assistant at Harvard, rose to become his key lieutenant in building the metaverse

Bosworth told The Los Angeles Times he resided on a horse ranch and vineyard in Santa Clara County, California.

In the 2011 interview, he said his family have lived on the ranch since 1891, and he has tattoos of California, a grizzly bear, and golden poppies tattooed on his right forearm.

Bosworth studied computer science at Harvard, where he met Mark Zuckerberg in an artificial intelligence class in 2004.

Bosworth left university and briefly worked at Microsoft. He started working for Facebook in 2006.

In a 2021 interview with The Verge, Bosworth said his brief time at Microsoft taught him a lot about "professional software development and management."

He recalled to The Verge that when he joined Facebook, there were roughly 15 engineers working at the company. Bosworth added there are only five or six employees who have been at Meta longer than he has.

Bosworth was responsible for building the Facebook's first News Feed.

In 2012, Bosworth took what was supposed to be a six-month sabbatical from the company - but instead he took over its ads business.

In a 2015 interview with Wired, Bosworth said six months ahead of the planned sabbatical in 2012 Zuckerberg asked him to figure out a way to monetize ads on mobile.

"[Zuckerberg] was like: 'There are at least four billion-dollar opportunities on mobile in the next six months. You can unlock one or two. And then you can go on your vacation.' That's an insane thing to say. But I was like: 'Why not?'" Bosworth told Wired.

Two days before Bosworth was supposed to go on his sabbatical, Zuckerberg asked him to head up engineering for all Facebook's advertising products, and Bosworth accepted.

Bosworth ended up taking a two-month trip and then tacked on some extra time off at the end of the year. " I just kept taking it by halves," he told Wired.

Bosworth ran Facebook's ads business until 2017.

He has been running the company's consumer hardware division - now called Reality Labs - for the last four years.

Reality Labs is set to be an integral part of Meta's metaverse ambitions.

Under Bosworth's stewardship Facebook launched a smart glasses product together with Ray-Ban.

In September 2021, the company announced Bosworth will take over as chief technology officer in 2022.

Bosworth has sometimes proved a controversial figure inside Facebook.

Zuckerberg denounced Bosworth's memo after BuzzFeed broke the story.

"Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means," Zuckerberg said.

During a committee hearing in front of Irish lawmakers in 2018, head of public policy at Facebook Ireland Nimah Sweeney also said Bosworth has a "reputation for posting provocative material to get a conversation going" inside the company.

"I think a lot of us would like to go back and hit delete before he ever managed to send that," Sweeney added.

Documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that as recently as 2020, Bosworth was still writing memos about hate on Facebook's platform.

Insider first reported on the August 2020 memo entitled "Demand Side Problems," which was contained in a cache of documents released by Haugen.

In the memo, Bosworth appeared to question whether it was futile for Facebook to try to address hate speech on its platforms. Bosworth also posted the memo to his personal blog in early 2021.

"As a society we don't have a hate speech supply problem, we have a hate speech demand problem," Bosworth wrote.

"Online platforms don't work on the supply side because they don't control the demand side," he added. 

Alongside writing on his personal blog, Bosworth also hosts his own podcast called "Boz to the Future."