Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that the company has made mistakes on privacy and says he's "quite sure" he didn't sign a contract giving a former Web designer ownership of the company.
Zuckerberg, 26, talked about being at the helm of a burgeoning company, making mistakes and tackling the issues facing the wildly popular social network, in a far-reaching interview with TV news anchor Diane Sawyer on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer Wednesday night.
The interview came the same day that Facebook announced it had signed up its 500 millionth user.
"I started Facebook when I was 19. I didn't know much about business," said Zuckerberg, when Sawyer asked him what he would have done differently along the road to making Facebook a worldwide social networking powerhouse.
"I would have done a lot of things differently, but I hope instead of making the mistakes I made, I would have made different mistakes," he said.
Zuckerberg also said the company will sell stock in an IPO "when it makes sense."
In the interview, Sawyer focused on Facebook being at the heart of the social networking revolution that has changed the way people stay in touch with friends and family.
Facebook, Sawyer said, gets eight new users every second, and each user generally has about 130 connected friends.
Zuckerberg said he sees Facebook as being a very democratic medium, giving people "a voice and power," but he also acknowledged that a lot of users have been angry and frustrated over the site's privacy policies and controls.
"Yah, we've made mistakes. For sure," he told Sawyer. And when she asked him why Facebook doesn't simply automatically set people's individual settings to make their information private from the get-go, he replied, "I think it's set in a way to help people share."
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in the Diane Sawyer interview on Wednesday.
Facebook recently simplified its privacy controls after users complained that the settings were confusing and frustrating.