Christopher Poole

Although Poole does not like to divulge much about his private life. According to some sources, he is married to television weather anchor Marysol Castro and is blessed with twin sons, Liam and Gavin.

Christopher Poole was born in 1988 in New York City, New York, US. There is no information available on his early life, family background and education.

According to a report in ‘The Washington Post,’ Poole dropped out of the Virginia Commonwealth University after attending a few semesters. The report also mentioned that he was residing with his mother and was seeking a way out to earn money as the owner of ‘4chan’.

Before coming up with ‘4chan,’ he used to participate on ‘Something Awful’ forums quite often. He wanted to develop an American counterpart of the famous imageboard of Japan called ‘Futaba Channel’ (‘2chan), which would also be a place to discuss anime and manga. He launched the imageboard website, ‘4chan,’ on October 1, 2003, when he was just 15 years of age.

While creating ‘4chan,’ he used AltaVista's Babel Fish online translator to translate the source code of the Futaba Channel website from Japanese text to English.

Initially ‘4chan’ had just two boards, namely ‘/a/ – Anime/General’ and ‘/b/ – Anime/Random’ (later renamed as ‘/b/ – Random’) of which the Random board was created first. Eventually, other boards were created with their own specific content and guidelines. The site was called "the ground zero of Western web culture” by Leopoldo Godoy of Brazilian TV Globo in 2008.

In a ‘Time’ magazine open internet poll, he was voted as world's most influential person of 2008. However, as voting was influenced by manual ballot stuffing and automated voting programs, the outcome of such result raised questions even prior to the completion of the poll. Intervention of 4chan looked a possibility as it was discovered that the first letter of the poll’s first 21 candidates put together form a phrase that contain 2 memes of 4chan, "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME.”

Renowned by pseudonym ‘moot,’ the real identity of Poole was disclosed in ‘The Wall Street Journal,’ on July 9, 2008. The then book critic and lead technology writer at ‘Time’ magazine, Lev Grossman, also published an interview on that day elucidating the influence of the non-visible administrator ‘moot,’ whom he claimed to identify as Christopher Poole. An article in ‘The Observer’ described him as the most influential web entrepreneur ever.