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SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” — holdings currently worth more than $45 billion — to charitable purposes.
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The pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born about a week ago.

Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, said they were forming a new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to manage the money, through an unusual limited liability corporate structure. “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” they wrote.


Mr. Zuckerberg’s charitable plans are the latest indication of a growing interest in philanthropy among Silicon Valley’s young billionaires, who unlike previous generations of business tycoons, appear eager to spread their wealth while they are still young. Mr. Zuckerberg is 31, and Dr. Chan is 30.

Yet they are entering largely uncharted waters with a charity effort of such scale. They have not yet detailed how the money will be spent and the pace at which the money will be given out indicates they plan to take their time.

The couple have had mixed results in earlier charitable efforts.

In 2010, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan gave $100 million to improve the public schools in Newark. The money expanded high-performing charter schools but encountered fierce resistance from many parents, community activists and unions. Mr. Zuckerberg has said he learned a lot from the experience.

Still, Larry Brilliant, who works on philanthropic issues with many Silicon Valley figures including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, and Jeff Skoll, the co-founder of eBay, said that both the scale and timing of Mr. Zuckerberg’s commitment, coming so early in his career, were rare.

“I hope this will be a model for Mark’s generation,” said Dr. Brilliant, a physician who also previously ran Google’s charitable arm, Google.org.

The Silicon Valley way of philanthropy also demands more control over where the money is spent, though it remains to be seen if this hands-on formula will be successful.

“We must build technology to make change. Many institutions invest money in these challenges, but most progress comes from productivity gains through innovation,” they wrote in the letter to their daughter. “We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates. Many institutions are unwilling to do this, but progress must be supported by movements to be sustainable.”


In a securities filing, Facebook said Mr. Zuckerberg planned “to sell or gift no more than $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years.” He intends to retain his majority voting position in the company’s stock for the foreseeable future.

This week, Mr. Zuckerberg was also one of the billionaires who signed on to the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group organized by the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to contribute toward a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund. The announcement coincided with a Paris summit meeting intended to forge a global accord to cut planet-warming emissions.

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Mr. Zuckerberg has referred to Mr. Gates as one of his childhood heroes for his zeal in building Microsoft into a colossus in the technology industry. Mr. Gates is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated worth of $85.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The index estimates that Mr. Zuckerberg’s total worth is $46.8 billion.

Mr. Zuckerberg has admired Mr. Gates’s philanthropic endeavors, too, becoming one of the first people to join the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Mr. Gates and Warren E. Buffett to get wealthy individuals and their families to give away more than half of their wealth to charities during their lifetimes or after. Mr. Gates has pledged to give away at least 95 percent of his wealth.

“None of this would have happened without Bill Gates,” Dr. Brilliant said.

In a statement, Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda, congratulated Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan.

“The example you’re setting today is an inspiration to us and the world,” they said. “We can be confident of this: Max and every child born today will grow up in a world that is better than the one we know now. As you say, ‘Seeds planted now will grow.’ Your work will bear fruit for many decades to come.”

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan had previously pledged about $1.6 billion to charitable endeavors, according to a spokeswoman for the family.
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Recent Comments
mario_mic 18 minutes ago

Good for them wanting to do that but if I were them I would be a little selfish and just keep a billion to myself lol
Josh Folds 19 minutes ago

Zuckerberg giving 99% of his fortune is hardly a widow's mite. That still leaves he and his wife with more than most people will ever need...
Jack 19 minutes ago

What is common, besides being American billionaire philanthropists, among Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffet? They are much more liberal than any...

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“Having this child has made us think about all of the things that should be improved in the world for her whole generation,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video. “The only way that we reach our full human potential is if we’re able to unlock the gifts of every person around the world.”

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have recently made visible investments and gifts in several kindergarten-through-high-school education projects.

In May, AltSchool, a private school start-up in San Francisco that develops personalized learning technologies, announced that it had raised $100 million from a group of investors, including a donor-advised fund financed by the Zuckerberg family at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

In September, Facebook announced that it was working with Summit Public Schools, a charter school network, to develop an online platform to help tailor education to the needs and interests of individual students.

In November, EducationSuperhighway, a nonprofit group that helps K-12 schools tap federal funds for high-speed classroom Internet connections, announced that the couple had agreed to donate $20 million to its work.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have also given to health care causes, including a $75 million gift to San Francisco General Hospital, which was renamed in their honor.

The ultimate value of the Zuckerberg family’s charitable pledge is unknown. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan intend to gradually transfer their Facebook stock or the proceeds from stock sales to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

If Facebook shares continue to appreciate, the value of the gift could be much higher than the current estimate of $45 billion.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and a billionaire as well, also applauded Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcement and said he shared the Facebook executive’s interest in education and innovation.

“The only question now is: How many of his peers in Silicon Valley and beyond will join him?” Mr. Bloomberg said.

In a Facebook post to newborn child Max, the Facebook CEO says he will administer the initiative himself using 99% of shares in company’s stock.

 

The Zuckerbergs announced two births on Tuesday: a baby girl, and to one of the world’s biggest charities.

That sterling spoon you might have been considering for Mark Zuckerberg’s new baby may no longer be the most exciting gift to the Facebook billionaire’s daughter: after revealing his wife, Priscilla Chan, had given birth to their first child, Max, Zuckerberg announced the creation of a charity organization called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The couple have pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares in their lifetime, currently worth about $45bn.

The charity, which has “the mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality”, will be administered by the CEO himself and is already on track to be worth a potential $3bn by 2018.

Zuckerberg announced the move on Facebook in the form of a letter to his baby:

Dear Max,
Your mother and I don’t yet have the words to describe the hope you give us for the future. Your new life is full of promise, and we hope you will be happy and healthy so you can explore it fully. You’ve already given us a reason to reflect on the world we hope you live in.
Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today.
While headlines often focus on what’s wrong, in many ways the world is getting better. Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. People are connecting. Technological progress in every field means your life should be dramatically better than ours today.
We will do our part to make this happen, not only because we love you, but also because we have a moral responsibility to all children in the next generation.
We believe all lives have equal value, and that includes the many more people who will live in future generations than live today. Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here.

Zuckerberg plans to finance the endeavor using his stock options. Some 99% of his shares will go to the charity – the tech tycoon owns 4m shares of class A common stock and 419m shares of class B, which have the majority of voting rights.

“[D]uring his lifetime, he will gift or otherwise direct substantially all of his shares of Facebook stock, or the net after-tax proceeds from sales of such shares, to further the mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality by means of philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good,” the company said in the filing.
Joel Fleishman, professor of law and public policy sciences at Duke University, said he believed the announcement would spur giving among the super-rich.
“I follow this pretty closely and hardly a day goes by that somebody doesn’t say he’s going to give away all his assets to charity,” Fleishman said, noting that Zuckerberg’s early-years Facebook colleague Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna said they were going to give away their fortune, which amounts to some $8bn, as well. “It does exemplify the spirit of the times.”
Fleishman observed that the project had become particularly popular among the young and extraordinarily wealthy, who prefer “giving while living” to willing their assets to charity. “I celebrate his decision to do it as I celebrate Warren Buffet’s decision to give all that money to the Gates Foundation. People who’ve made all that money are by nature competitive; someone that young giving away that much money will undoubtedly stimulate others to do likewise.”
But it’s not the executive’s first foray into charity, nor the first this week. Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and others announced an initiative to invest in new energy sources to stem the rising tide of climate change on Monday.

Results of his previous philanthropic efforts have been mixed: In 2010, Zuckerberg partnered with then-mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker (who has since become the state’s junior senator) to improve the notoriously poor-quality schools in the city with a donation of $100m. The endeavor was widely criticized for the percentage of the gift that went to pay consultants, among other problems.

FWD.us, a political advocacy group started by Zuckerberg and Gates, has also stalled after its efforts to lobby for immigration reform failed, despite some $50m in backing from big-name tech personalities.