Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan welcomed their daughter, Maxima, to our world yesterday. The couple plans to gradually donate the shares to the newly formed Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
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In a stunning surprise, the couple announced that they will donate 99 percent of their shares of stock in Facebook, now worth about $45 billion, to promoting a better world. They are forming a new organisation, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, that will pursue those goals. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make use of your own resources to make a significant difference in your community.
The year before Zuckerberg and Chan gave the same Foundation $500m (£332m).
“Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities”, the Facebook chief and his wife said.
Everything Mark Zuckerberg does is eyed with intense scrutiny, not least due to the nature of Facebook’s business of making money from personal data.
The days of Mark Zuckerberg being seen as a nerdy, awkward tech dork are well behind us. He wrote, “Our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality”. The couple are signatories to The Giving Pledge which is a campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates that encourages the world’s richest people to give away most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. “If we can help children get a better education now then they can grow up and help others too in the time we might have otherwise waited to get started”. They added: “We must make long term investments over 25, 50 or even 100 years”.
Facebook said Zuckerberg’s role at the company won’t change.
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Zuckerberg and Chan had announced on Facebook last July that they were expecting a daughter, after Chan had three previous miscarriages.
