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Before and after photos show how dramatically world-famous CEOs have changed since they started the job

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  • The tech industry with all its innovation, glamour, and youth can still be incredibly stressful. As companies launch, go public, and tackle turmoil, executives go gray, lose weight, and forget to buy eye cream.
  • Tech execs like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos were once fresh faces on the scene. Now, they've crafted themselves into multibillionaires while growing their businesses into worldwide success stories.
  • Take a look at how dramatically these tech execs have changed since they've started the job.

Any time Mark Zuckerberg mentions Facebook, he often brings up how he started it in his dorm room at Harvard when he was just 20 years old. Early photos of Zuckerberg show him in a plain t-shirt, sweats, and Adidas sandals lounging on the steps of his would-be alma mater.

And although Zuckerberg's wardrobe hasn't changed much (albeit the slides and sweats), the company he founded has.

Today, Facebook has more than 2.3 billion users and has fought to keep its reputability as privacy scandals continue to plague the social network and Zuckerberg himself.

Take a look at how dramatically other world-famous CEOs changed over the course of their job:

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AP

Before Amazon, Bezos was a senior vice president at D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund, until 1993 when he decided to begin selling books on the internet.

In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and in 45 different countries. And it continued to grow. Amazon went public on May 15, 1997.

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Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images

Much of Bezos' wealth comes not from his salary but from the Amazon shares he owns. Bezos currently holds 78,893,033 shares in Amazon, accounting for a 16.3% ownership stake.

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Justine Hunt/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

He then dropped out of school after his sophomore year to focus on the social network full-time. Facebook raised its $12.7 million Series A round of funding while he was barely of legal drinking age. Time magazine named him "Person of the Year" just six years later, while Facebook's initial public offering in 2012 was the biggest-ever technology IPO at the time.

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However, for the last two years, Facebook has faced scandal after scandal. It's been called out on multiple occasions for the way it handles user data. Zuckerberg testified for 10 hours in front of Congress last April over the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal. Facebook has also been the center of debates regarding how to regulate when tech companies that have too much power.

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AP

Jobs was historically the brains behind Apple, while Wozniak was the engineer. In 1984, Apple released its first personal computer, the Macintosh.

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Jobs famously left (or was ousted, depending on who you believe) in 1985, after clashing with CEO John Sculley. Twelve years later, Apple bought Jobs' startup NeXT Computer, bringing him back into the fold.

Jeff Chiu/AP

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According to Forbes, in 2007, Jobs' net worth was just over $7 billion. In August of 2011, Jobs handed the CEO reins to Tim Cook and went on medical leave. In October 2011, he died at 56.

Today, Apple's market cap is close to $675 billion and is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

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Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Jobs is held up as one of the greatest CEOs in history. There was a lot of uncertainty over whether or not Apple could keep the momentum going under Cook.

In 2015, Cook pioneered and released the Apple Watch, the company's first entirely new product in the post-Jobs era.

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AP

In January, after Apple missed its holiday sales targets, Cook said the company's biggest long-term project is to break into consumer health, signaling the CEO's plans to make Apple irreplaceable in the lives of its costumers.

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Gates and Allen met in high school, when both were obsessed with computers and software. They built Microsoft from a company that just designed and sold software, into one that sells its own consumer electronics, operating suites, and personal computers.

Allen died in 2018 at the age of 85.

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REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Along the way, he became the second richest man in the world, and is now giving his fortune away to all kinds of good causes alongside his wife, Melinda, with their foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the largest private foundation in the world. Gates has not worked at Microsoft since 2008.

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Nooyi first joined the company in 1994 as a chief strategist.

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Dorsey was later ousted from Twitter, the micro-blogging site he thought up, going on to start Square, the mobile payments platform, in 2009.

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Getty

His startup Square, on the other hand, is a multibillion-dollar company and was valued at $3 billion at its IPO in 2015.

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Flickr via JDLasica

Soon after, Spiegel dropped out of Stanford University to work on Snapchat full time.

Tim Cook ended up becoming an early Snapchat investor because he was so impressed with Spiegel. Spiegel also famously rebuffed a $3 billion offer from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2013.

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Getty

In 2017, he was given an $800 million bonus for taking his company, Snap Inc., public at a $33 billion valuation.

Spiegel is married to model and entrepreneur Miranda Kerr, and the couple welcomed their first child a baby boy named Hart in 2018.

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Paul Harris/Getty Images

By then, Musk, already a multimillionaire, had a long history in founding and funding various tech startups like SpaceX and PayPal.

Musk took an active product role at Tesla, helping develop its first car, the Roadster. The all-electric Roadster launched in 2006, when Musk was serving as Tesla's chairman.

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It's been just over a decade since Musk was named CEO of Tesla and he's since made hefty investments in autopilot, the company's self-driving car technology.

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Tesla's "autopilot" system is available on all three of its models, including the new Model 3 a lower-cost car launched in early 2017 that brings the company closer to its goal of making electric vehicles that are affordable for the masses.

Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images

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The two founded Google in a garage in Menlo Park, California. They met when Page was touring Stanford University in 1995. Both soon thereafter dropped out of Stanford.

Google, the catalog of "every link on the internet," is now the world's most-used search engine. The company has also branched out significantly: It spans video content, mobile technology, education, digital libraries, and even self-driving cars.

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Page and Brin only take a $1 salary from Google.

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Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Brin is the president of Alphabet Inc., and has been known to live luxuriously, as he owns the world's fastest yacht, and is a fan of Tesla.

Source : Bloomberg , Business Insider , Bloomberg

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As one of the key drivers of the growing computer industry, Oracle grew fast. In 1986, Oracle had its initial public offering, reporting revenue of $55 million.

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And although he no longer heads the company he founded, Ellison still sits as Oracle's chairman of the board and chief technology officer.

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REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

After several vice president positions, Nadella was named president of the Server and Tools Division before he finally ascended to the CEO role in 2014.

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REUTERS

Under his leadership, Microsoft has acquired big-name companies such as LinkedIn and GitHub, enjoyed rising stock, and is once again considered a major threat to Apple.

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REUTER

Whitman stayed at eBay for 10 years and left the company in 2008 as a billionaire.

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REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

After seven years with HP, Whitman announced in 2018 she would be leaving to assume her third CEO position at Jeffrey Katzenberg's (DreamWorks co-founder) mobile-video startup.

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AP Photo/Rebecca McEntee

Under its new name, Dell Computer Corp., the company went public in 1988 and a few years later, at age 27, Dell became the youngest CEO ever to lead a Fortune 500 company.

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REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Dell now has a net worth of $31.1 billion, making him the 28th richest person in the world.

See Also:

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SEE ALSO: The CEO of a top travel app who gets up at 5:15 a.m. says he tricked himself into becoming a morning person by changing his daily exercise routine

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