Zuckerberg last month said he would be taking two months off after his daughter’s birth.
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If a prize were to be awarded for the biggest gift on Giving Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan would very likely walk away with it.
Facebook co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that he and his wife Priscilla Chan would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” – holdings now worth more than $45 billion.
More than 130 billionaires worldwide have joined them, including Judy Faulkner, founder of the electronic health-records company Epic, who reportedly said she plans to give away 99 percent of her money.
Zuckerberg “has an audience that’s just totally different than what I would have”, Buffett, 85, said past year at a conference in Las Vegas. “We have a basic moral responsibility to tilt our investments”.
The pair said they are forming a new organisation called the “Chan Zuckerberg” initiative, and plan to manage the money through a limited liability corporate structure.
“I will continue to serve as Facebook’s CEO for many, many years to come, but these issues are too important to wait until you or we are older to begin this work”, the letter reads.
Zuckerberg and Chan are among some of the tech industry’s most notable people to sign The Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Bill and Melinda Gates to encourage billionaires to dedicate their wealth into giving back to the people.
The company’s growth has happened as Zuckerberg, 31, has grown up in the public eye. They married nine years later in 2012, the day after Facebook’s initial public offering. He’s even established a Facebook page for his dog, Beast.
Bill Gates, the former Microsoft CEO and still the world’s richest man with an estimated wealth of .6 billion, pledged to give away most of his fortune to charity when he stepped down from the company behind the Windows operating system in 2008.
They also announced the launch of the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation.
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“Can our generation cure disease so you live much longer and healthier lives?” “It’s incredibly impressive and an enormous commitment that really eclipses anything that we’ve seen in terms of size”, said Phil Buchanan, president of the nonprofit Center for Effective Philanthropy. “We understand you’ll have many questions about why and how we’re doing this”. The earliest she can open her own Facebook account is when she turns 13, according to the social network’s rules.
