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How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself

32 points by SpaceInvader 11y ago

rogeryu 11y ago
Quote from the article: Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong. Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle. In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other. An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That’s what America is all about. But as a society, we don’t generally call these types of activities “charity.” (End of quote)
- sametmax 11y ago
  Exactly. This is what kills me with the recent trend of claming billionairs are heroes. This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect. E.G: I lived and worked in Africa. I saw the results of the "green revolution" made by Monsanto, an destructive agriculture program financially supported by the Gates. It's ugly. The continent is still recovering from it (and apparently they are in better shape than some parts of India). But the Gate foundation says they want to help Africa : they fight malaria. So on one hand african people can starve, have no control over their agriculture or natural ressources, but they _may_ be saved from malaria in 10 years. This is hypocrisy at its best. They are not heroes. They are smart investors. And for one thing they build for others, they build 3 for themself and may destroy many things on their path. Do not get blinded by their (good) PR.
  - rudi-c 11y ago
    How is the money invested exactly, do you know? Is he actually funding those companies in some way, or does he just own some stocks as part of some very diversified portfolio? If it's the former, I really want to know. If it's the latter, stating that the Gates is financially supporting the destruction of agriculture is a very very strong claim. You need to argue that buying a company's stock on an open market does something significant besides increase the price of that stock by some small amount, or that the increase is meaningful. I have a hard time imagining what practical impact it would have on Monsanto's short term or long term operations that would justify using words such as "hypocrite". There are investment funds that try to avoid "dirty" stocks, and it maybe it would be morally better to invest only in those funds. Until then, is everyone who invests in an index fund "dirty"? Monsanto is part of the S&P 500 after all.
    - sametmax 11y ago
      Investing is not a number game. It has consequences on the real world. If you buy a stock of people making weapons, yes, you are helping to create a world with more weapons. You are, quite litteraly, owning a piece of a company making weapons. You can argue that you are ok with building weapon. It's another debate. But you can't say you are not helping. Companies are selling shares on the market because it helps them. And if tomorrow you make a big speech about gun control, it makes you a hypocrite. You can slice it in many way, use semantics, play the cards of the layer of abstractions. But in the end, it's a simple truth.
  - Oletros 11y ago
    > This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect. Any source for that?
    - sametmax 11y ago
      http://www.thenation.com/article/how-gates-foundations-investments-are-undermining-its-own-good-works/ http://www.thenation.com/article/how-gates-foundations-inves...
aton 11y ago
This might be a downvote target, but I think it's worth it. So here I go. I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this: 1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates. 2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery. 3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google? 4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.
- puredemo 11y ago
  That's the beauty of capitalism -- the market decides value, not some random bystander. Who really cares whether you would group Zuckerberg with Buffett and Gates or not? I don't understand why that is relevant to the article.
- scotty79 11y ago
  > The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. And Gates? The fact that he's now old and smiling clouds your judgement. Zuckerberg might be old benevolent founding father in 30 years too.
puredemo 11y ago
>Maybe Mr. Zuckerberg will make wonderful decisions, ones I would personally be happy with. Maybe not. He blew his $100 million donation to the Newark school system.. Hopefully Zuckerberg learned a valuable lesson there -- improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them. Case-in-point: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html (warning, long read) Are we really going to begrudge Zuckerberg for trusting Cory Booker, who was by all accounts very persuasive, and investing $100M+ in inner city schools? That's hardly bad behavior as the article seems to imply.
- brador 11y ago
  > improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them. Because of the prevailing infrastructure. If instead he had created a customized boarding school for the inner city kids somewhere safe and pleasant we'd be seeing real meaingingful change in their outlook right now. As it is, they were in the same unhealthy environment they've always been in. It's not the schools, it's the teachers, the streets, their peers, the home life, everything. A boarding school is the best solution to fix all that.
  - calbear81 11y ago
    What about the fact that you're removing them from their families? Yes, the children may have a better future but they also become disconnected from their communities.
  - DrillBitterMan 11y ago
    Research shows that school racial integration alone increases outcomes for all children by high double digits. In fact, racial integration is to my knowledge the only reliable method anyone has bothered to attempt to improve educational outcomes in underachieving schools. What are referred to as "inner city schools" can more relevantly be referred to as re-segregated schools or just never-integrated schools. ProPublica came out with extremely compelling data on this subject just several weeks ago.
x1798DE 11y ago
I have to say, I don't care what Zuckerberg spends his money on, it's his money. I found it pretentious when he deigned to write an open letter to his daughter informing the world that he was going to go on a spending spree, but I'm also not too keen on everyone on both sides analyzing whether his motivations are pure. If he was going to buy a thousand jet planes and start a jet plane demolition derby I don't know if anyone would bother asking if he might have some ulterior motive. Then again, I don't go in for hero worship, do I have any need to identify who is doing something heroic and who isn't.
- 91bananas 11y ago
  That is an amazing idea for those jet planes.
- kcanini 11y ago
  I think you missed the point: Zuckerberg is doing this to avoid paying taxes on his billions of dollars of accumulated wealth. Part of that money should be going back to the society that helped him earn it. Instead, he will have complete control over how it is spent.
  - x1798DE 11y ago
    He is under no obligation to pay taxes he does not owe. Tax deductability of charitable giving is effectively government spending, so take it up with your lawmakers if you don't want that. It has no bearing on Zuckerberg from a legal perspective, and since I'm not out to judge him, I don't really care if he decides to spend his money on a foundation or give it to the government.

32 points by SpaceInvader 11y ago

Quote from the article: Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong. Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle. In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other. An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That’s what America is all about. But as a society, we don’t generally call these types of activities “charity.” (End of quote)

sametmax 11y ago
Exactly. This is what kills me with the recent trend of claming billionairs are heroes. This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect. E.G: I lived and worked in Africa. I saw the results of the "green revolution" made by Monsanto, an destructive agriculture program financially supported by the Gates. It's ugly. The continent is still recovering from it (and apparently they are in better shape than some parts of India). But the Gate foundation says they want to help Africa : they fight malaria. So on one hand african people can starve, have no control over their agriculture or natural ressources, but they _may_ be saved from malaria in 10 years. This is hypocrisy at its best. They are not heroes. They are smart investors. And for one thing they build for others, they build 3 for themself and may destroy many things on their path. Do not get blinded by their (good) PR.
- rudi-c 11y ago
  How is the money invested exactly, do you know? Is he actually funding those companies in some way, or does he just own some stocks as part of some very diversified portfolio? If it's the former, I really want to know. If it's the latter, stating that the Gates is financially supporting the destruction of agriculture is a very very strong claim. You need to argue that buying a company's stock on an open market does something significant besides increase the price of that stock by some small amount, or that the increase is meaningful. I have a hard time imagining what practical impact it would have on Monsanto's short term or long term operations that would justify using words such as "hypocrite". There are investment funds that try to avoid "dirty" stocks, and it maybe it would be morally better to invest only in those funds. Until then, is everyone who invests in an index fund "dirty"? Monsanto is part of the S&P 500 after all.
  - sametmax 11y ago
    Investing is not a number game. It has consequences on the real world. If you buy a stock of people making weapons, yes, you are helping to create a world with more weapons. You are, quite litteraly, owning a piece of a company making weapons. You can argue that you are ok with building weapon. It's another debate. But you can't say you are not helping. Companies are selling shares on the market because it helps them. And if tomorrow you make a big speech about gun control, it makes you a hypocrite. You can slice it in many way, use semantics, play the cards of the layer of abstractions. But in the end, it's a simple truth.
- Oletros 11y ago
  > This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect. Any source for that?
  - sametmax 11y ago
    http://www.thenation.com/article/how-gates-foundations-investments-are-undermining-its-own-good-works/ http://www.thenation.com/article/how-gates-foundations-inves...

aton 11y ago

This might be a downvote target, but I think it's worth it. So here I go. I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this: 1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates. 2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery. 3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google? 4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.

puredemo 11y ago
That's the beauty of capitalism -- the market decides value, not some random bystander. Who really cares whether you would group Zuckerberg with Buffett and Gates or not? I don't understand why that is relevant to the article.
scotty79 11y ago
> The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. And Gates? The fact that he's now old and smiling clouds your judgement. Zuckerberg might be old benevolent founding father in 30 years too.

puredemo 11y ago

>Maybe Mr. Zuckerberg will make wonderful decisions, ones I would personally be happy with. Maybe not. He blew his $100 million donation to the Newark school system.. Hopefully Zuckerberg learned a valuable lesson there -- improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them. Case-in-point: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html (warning, long read) Are we really going to begrudge Zuckerberg for trusting Cory Booker, who was by all accounts very persuasive, and investing $100M+ in inner city schools? That's hardly bad behavior as the article seems to imply.

brador 11y ago
> improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them. Because of the prevailing infrastructure. If instead he had created a customized boarding school for the inner city kids somewhere safe and pleasant we'd be seeing real meaingingful change in their outlook right now. As it is, they were in the same unhealthy environment they've always been in. It's not the schools, it's the teachers, the streets, their peers, the home life, everything. A boarding school is the best solution to fix all that.
- calbear81 11y ago
  What about the fact that you're removing them from their families? Yes, the children may have a better future but they also become disconnected from their communities.
- DrillBitterMan 11y ago
  Research shows that school racial integration alone increases outcomes for all children by high double digits. In fact, racial integration is to my knowledge the only reliable method anyone has bothered to attempt to improve educational outcomes in underachieving schools. What are referred to as "inner city schools" can more relevantly be referred to as re-segregated schools or just never-integrated schools. ProPublica came out with extremely compelling data on this subject just several weeks ago.

x1798DE 11y ago

I have to say, I don't care what Zuckerberg spends his money on, it's his money. I found it pretentious when he deigned to write an open letter to his daughter informing the world that he was going to go on a spending spree, but I'm also not too keen on everyone on both sides analyzing whether his motivations are pure. If he was going to buy a thousand jet planes and start a jet plane demolition derby I don't know if anyone would bother asking if he might have some ulterior motive. Then again, I don't go in for hero worship, do I have any need to identify who is doing something heroic and who isn't.

91bananas 11y ago
That is an amazing idea for those jet planes.
kcanini 11y ago
I think you missed the point: Zuckerberg is doing this to avoid paying taxes on his billions of dollars of accumulated wealth. Part of that money should be going back to the society that helped him earn it. Instead, he will have complete control over how it is spent.
- x1798DE 11y ago
  He is under no obligation to pay taxes he does not owe. Tax deductability of charitable giving is effectively government spending, so take it up with your lawmakers if you don't want that. It has no bearing on Zuckerberg from a legal perspective, and since I'm not out to judge him, I don't really care if he decides to spend his money on a foundation or give it to the government.