In September 2014 Persson announced on his personal website that he had concluded he "[didn't have the connection to his fans he thought he had]", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation.

Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding homosexuality, race, and transgender rights issues have caused public controversies.

Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva,[2] and a Swedish father, Birger,[3] on 1 June 1979.

[8] According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies.

[7][8] By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18.

[6][11] Persson, although introverted,[2] was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend.

As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB.

[10][13] One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress.

[17] While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper.

Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game.

[20][10][21] Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev.

[17] In September 2010, Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, where he took part in a programming exercise and met with Gabe Newell.

Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft.

Mojang held the first Minecon from 18–19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event.

[17] Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013.

[24] Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and the company.

Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets.

[30][31] He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities.

[36] Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009[37] and fully released on 18 November 2011.

Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten.

[39] On 17 August 2011, Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute.

[49] Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012.

[50] However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title.

[1] In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father:[6] When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision.

[65] Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised $458,248 for charity.

"[72][73][71] In 2017, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt",[74][75] although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement.

[76][9] Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white"[9][77][78] stating his belief that privilege was a "made up metric", although he denounced generalisations and differential treatment solely on the basis of skin colour.

"[80] On 10 March 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion.

[71] However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as.

[76] In 2019, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10th anniversary celebration of the game.