I would say the fact that he had the drive to quickly learn Chinese and then went to China and actually gave a talk in Chinese suggests he has higher than average mental aptitude.

He studied Chinese daily for four years prior to giving that talk.

Studying a language daily for four years suggests determination and willpower, yes.

But I would expect most people who have studied a language daily for four years to be able to give a talk in that language if they needed to and knew ahead of time. I'm not sure that's a non-average learning time.

> citation

Citations widely available via the obvious web searches. Here are responses on Quora with some details about how the hackers hired by Facebook worked around PHP's limitations.

https://www.quora.com/Does-Facebook-still-use-PHP?share=1

If Mark was a hacker of some kind, he was a growth hacker. That's what Facebook was (in)famous for in its early days - implementing various little psychological tricks that drove adoption. A lot of that came from Mark (initially, pretty much all of it).

I'm not aware of any evidence that he was an exceptional engineer. So what? Why would he even care about being that? As long as you can hire engineers that are better than you, you don't need to be a great one to grow a social network. We're not talking about AI here.

iirc, Zuckerberg did not think up the concept for the like button - which was one of the huge drivers for engagement on the site.

Having said that, I think Zuckerberg was a hacker. He made a few small web apps and one took off. His success shouldn't mean he is not a hacker.

I don't think the definition of a hacker is "made a few small web apps" or "one of his apps took off".

That would make him an entrepreneur and a web programmer.

Not a hacker, which (in this context) is about a great relationship with programming than "making a few web apps".