Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, did not set out to build a business.

Today the social media platform has a market capitalization of more than $500 billion and more than 2 billion monthly active users, and Zuckerberg is worth more than $70 billion, according to Forbes. But he was famously just a college student at Harvard when he launched "theFacebook" in 2004.

At the time, Zuckerberg says he was simply solving a problem he saw around him.

"Yeah, well, I never started this to build a company," says Zuckerberg, speaking to Freakonomics Radio as part of its six-week series called "The Secret Life of CEOs," which launched Thursday.

"Ten years ago, you know, I was just trying to help connect people at colleges and a few schools.

"That was a basic need, where I looked around at the internet and there were services for a lot of things that you wanted," says Zuckerberg, according to a transcript.



"You could find music; you could find news; you could find information, but you couldn't find and connect with the people that you cared about, which as people is actually the most important thing.

"So that seemed like a pretty big hole that needed to get filled."