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Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Give Away Fortune

• markbao 16y ago
  This is really great to hear. We need more of this. I'd pledge if I had any hugely significant sum like the others in the pledge, but alas.
  • jessriedel 16y ago
    > I'd pledge if I had any hugely significant sum like the others in the pledge Lives in the developing world can be saved for less than $1000/life (that is, something like $20 per disability-adjusted-life-year). You personally could save dozens--perhaps hundred--of human lives, which I consider to be hugely significant.
    • nhangen 16y ago
      but for how long?
      • DTrejo 16y ago
        their whole lives
      • jessriedel 16y ago
        I quoted $20 per disability-adjusted-life-year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year). That means for $1000 you could allow one child who otherwise would have died an infant to live into old age, extend the lives of 10 people by 5 years, etc.
      • train_robber 16y ago
        I earn a pretty good salary in a developing country. 'Pretty good' is quite relative and would be minuscule compared to salaries in the developed world. But - I live a comfortable life here, and 10% of my monthly salary I donate is sufficient to support 2 kids for schooling, lodging and food. So, yes, starting small means a lot, and it doesn't need to be a huge amount at all.
  • te_platt 16y ago
    There's no reason you couldn't start small. Find some cause you support or someone you know in greater need than yourself and contribute what you can. If you feel you can't do anything now you probably will always be able to find a reason you can't in the future.
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• SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  The big question will be does Zuck's fortune liquify at anywhere near the level that it is now. :)
  • salemh 16y ago
    Buffet's, Gate's and most of the other "big-dog's" hodling can't be liquidated for their Net Worth $ anyway. This story reminds me of Zuck turning down the near Billion $ acquisition offer from Yahoo! To him, its not about the wealth and I like that. Even if he never leaves a multi-billion $ fortune (which I think he will).
• jrockway 16y ago
  This makes it okay that he sells my list of friends to advertisers!
• tomjen3 16y ago
  Well, this will properly be nice for those who receive those founds, but I have to wonder why he did it. Why get a fortune just to give it away?
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  • jakarta 16y ago
    I think that for some people, particularly billionaires, money is more about keeping score.
    • RK 16y ago
      After a certain point, you obviously don't need any more money, but a lot of super rich people clearly can't help themselves in trying to accumulate more wealth.
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  • manvsmachine 16y ago
    A commonly reiterated finding is that, while having more money can indeed contribute towards a happier life, it only does so to a point. According the the article, Zuckerberg's speculatively worth roughly $6B; if this proves accurate and he gives 90% of that away, he's still sitting on a small fortune. I'd hope that he is capable of figuring out how to make do with "only" $600M or so.
  • chrisaycock 16y ago
    > Why get a fortune just to give it away? Why climb Mount Everest just to come back down?
    • deleted 16y ago
• jiganti 16y ago
  It's commendable for anyone to give away their money, but especially so when it's a guy in his mid-twenties.
  • RtodaAV 16y ago
    He doesn't have a billion dollars until the IPO. Good Luck Zuck.
• DevX101 16y ago
  After someone asked Warren Buffet why he wanted to give away all of his fortune, he replied: "I want to leave enough money to my children that they can do anything, but no so much that they will do nothing".
  • labuffer 16y ago
    Lawrence: Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit.
  • Luc 16y ago
    It's a great idea when your children are young, but they are in their fifties now...
  • spatulon 16y ago
    The British entrepreneur and investor Peter Jones also worried about that problem and decided to double any money his children earned for themselves.
    • petenixey 16y ago
      He's actually even more tactical than that. The multiple depended on the job his kids get. I think he said he'd quadruple a nurses salary but they wouldn't get anything at all if they became investment bankers.
    • hugh3 16y ago
      I don't like that as an incentive. For a start, it keeps your children in your financial orbit for the rest of your life. Secondly, it communicates to your children that you don't expect them ever to make as much money as you did. Whenever I wish I were super-wealthy, I try to remember that super wealth probably just creates all sorts of problems when raising children. If I ever do get super wealthy I'll plan to spend all but a few million dollars, secretly and out of sight of the children, before they reach the age of twelve, so that I don't have to worry about them growing up with the typical rich-kid problems.
• j4pe 16y ago
  There is no reason for Facebook to go public anytime in the near future. It will be more and more revenue positive as it refines its advertising model. Zuckerberg's contribution is therefore worth very little at the moment, outside of the tremendous commitment it implies for Mark. At some point, he will probably control huge amounts of wealth and it's bold of him to sign away most of the cash before he ever has control over it. But wouldn't it be amusing if Facebook were to go the way of preceding social networks, and leave the "world's youngest billionaire" looking a little silly for pledging a fortune that never materialized?
  • afterburner 16y ago
    They'll probably let him off the hook if he doesn't end up a billionaire...
  • benatkin 16y ago
    If Facebook does go the way of preceding social networks, it will happen in a very different way. They're a much more competent and diverse company than Friendster, MySpace, and Bebo were.
• nhangen 16y ago
  With great wealth, comes great power, and with great power, comes the ability to change the world. Though I loathe the way he's built Facebook, I trust someone like Zuck with several billion more than I trust someone without the ability to earn it. Who is going to be managing this money, and where is it going? Is this just a pledge, with no strings attached? The article isn't very forthcoming, and neither is the website: givingpledge.org I don't understand what's happened with Gates, and though I admire his sentiment, I think putting pressure on young entrepreneurs, who already have thousands of voices in their heads, is a wrong move. Call me callous, but this whole thing seems insane. Mark can do more good with his money by building new technologies than this fund could do manage multiple billions of dollars. It's rare that money on that scale is managed well.
• grandalf 16y ago
  I think of this as sort of a cop out (on the part of all the people who do it). If you're good at business, then you can have a far bigger impact by creating businesses than by simply giving your money to some charity. It's ultimately a socially lauded thing to do that divorces the donor from any ultimate responsibility for the amount of "greater good" done with the funds. I think they do it out of fear that they were a lucky, one-hit wonder... and out of low self-esteem or fear of the angry mob. YC is a great example of a way to use wealth to make a real difference. PG uses his acumen to help a lot more people level up. This multiplies wealth. Spending it on charities simply redistributes it. It makes me very pessimistic to see that the world's wealthiest people feel the need simply to pledge the money away, and no need to risk total failure by going out on a limb to do something bigger than whatever got them there. What if Bill Gates tried some long shot idea and it flopped? What if Zuckerberg or Case did? That would take real courage. This pledge nonsense reminds me of the self-satisfied smirks people emit when publicly putting money into the collection basket in a church. Why isn't one of these rich guys going to bat for Wikileaks? (Probably because it feels a lot better to be praised all the time for being such a great person by all the sycophants trying to get you to write a check!)
  • nhangen 16y ago
    I agree, and I think it's disappointing to see people pledge money so recklessly. And if it's not reckless, it's some sort of strange self-loathing that I don't understand. Just imagine what he could do by building an equally powerful company meant to fix just one problem...amazing things.
    • grandalf 16y ago
      Well put.
  • reneighbor 16y ago
    I disagree. I've heard Bill Gates speak and spoken with profs who worked with him; he is deeply informed on the health and edu issues he works on. If we can get smart, creative people tackling those, all the better. Some problems don't have a market solution.
• reneighbor 16y ago
  I like that it's about thinking how to give responsibly and effectively, pledging early in life so they can put their creativity to good use, as the article says. People who sign are trading ideas and logistical advice, it's like a book club for philanthropy.
• keiferski 16y ago
  It's certainly commendable to give away a vast fortune, and I don't want to take away from this honorable act in any way. But I wonder why more ridiculously wealthy entrepreneurs don't, ya know, preneur? Especially in the nonprofit "make a difference space". A billion dollars to charity is cool. You know what's really cool? A billion dollars towards a celebrity billionaire-spearheaded do-good project. (Or 1 million dollars each towards 1000 projects, etc.) Maybe I'm missing something, and I'm certainly no billionaire, so I probably am. But if I were a billionaire, I'd be more interested in angel investing (in promising, impactful projects) and my bringing my own ideas to life. But I digress. Bravo to the billionaires. Really, this is awesome.
• webXL 16y ago
  You can give it away while you're alive, or split it between your loved ones and the state when you die. I think it would be more fun giving it away to those most in need rather than enriching those who've already had a pretty good life... and your loved ones, too.
  • nhangen 16y ago
    perhaps, but if you teach and educate your children how they can duplicate your success, and give them a headstart with the fortune you've built, then you can do just as much, if not more, than the charity down the street. Look, I'm not advocating against giving, but I don't think jumping into pledges is the smartest way to begin.
• toephu 16y ago
  zuckerberg doesn't even have $10mil cash, let alone billions. it's all on paper.
  • frisco 16y ago
    This is false.
    • RtodaAV 16y ago
      Prove it.
• nhangen 16y ago
  This is from the PDF on the giving pledge website: "The pledge does not involve pooling money or supporting a particular set of causes or organizations. The pledge asks only that the individual give the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes or charitable organizations either before or after their death." Interesting way to do this. I still don't really understand the need for a pledge of this magnitude, but at least they aren't pooling the money or soliciting for specific causes. That being said, I still think Zuck is far too young to make such a strong commitment.
  • rorymarinich 16y ago
    > That being said, I still think Zuck is far too young to make such a strong commitment. Do you really think so? Mark is a few years older than me, and I've already arrived at the decision that I'd do much the same as him if I ever had the same cash. He's bright, quite savvy regarding the public, and he's got a great inner stamina. I doubt he worries if he's capable of making money — maybe he'll never equal Facebook's success, in fact probably he won't, but I doubt if he started all over again today he'd fail to make himself a comfortable, cozy living. It's not like he's being asked to live an ascetic lifestyle, though all stories I've read say that he's fairly minimal. He's just being asked to give away most of his money to help other people. In his case, "most of his wealth" still leaves him more than I've got at present.
    • nhangen 16y ago
      I'm just saying that when you're young, and you've had your head buried in work, hearing sage advice from mentors, advisors, and board members, it's possible that now isn't the best time to make that sort of decision. I'm not condemning it, and if it's what he wants to do, who am I to stop him, but something just doesn't feel right about it. That's just my .02
• burgerbrain 16y ago
  I'd rather see more people following the lead of Elon Musk than Bill Gates. Instead of throwing money at problems that will always exist and producing no real value, Musk is creating high-tech jobs and advancing the state of humanity.
  • manhotten 16y ago
    How dare bill gates help people get access to clean water and better agricultural techniques!
  • xiaoma 16y ago
    I share neither your certainty that malaria will always exist, nor your belief that ending the epidemic would produce no real value. Along with HIV, it has crippled a continent and caused immeasurable suffering. Elon Musk is doing great things. How many other potential Musks are there whose opportunities to do such things were cut short due to the very problems the Gates foundation addresses? Even just in his home country, South Africa, there have likely been a few.
    • klbarry 16y ago
      Absolutely - in Hans Rosling's famous TED speech, he mentions how public health is the most important thing regarding a countries economic growth and well being.
  • smallhands 16y ago
    i disagree with you elon musk is just creating toys for the rich.bill gates and likes are working on real problems . In some developing countries that l know you may not believe how hard it is to get a clean drinking water
  • mquander 16y ago
    It's certainly a testament to the power of perspective that you've dismissed a quarter of the planet living sick, hungry, and in poverty as "problems that will always exist", and decided that doing something about it produces no "real value."
• Jun8 16y ago
  AFAIK, Jobs has still not committed.
  • ladon86 16y ago
    From his Playboy interview, aged 29: Playboy: What does the money actually mean to you? Jobs: I still don't understand it. It's a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime--and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don't want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values. Playboy: So what do you do? Jobs: That's a part of my life that I like to keep private. When I have some time, I'm going to start a public foundation. I do some things privately now. Playboy: You could spend all of your time disbursing your money. Jobs: Oh, you have to. I'm convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar. Playboy: Could that be an excuse to put off doing something? Jobs: No. There are some simple reasons for that. One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy--there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can't succeed or fail, it's really hard to get better. Also, most of the time, the people who come to you with ideas don't provide the best ideas. You go seek the best ideas out, and that takes a lot of time. Playboy: If you plan to use your visibility to create a model for people, why is this one of the areas you choose not to discuss? Jobs: Because I haven't done anything much yet. In that area, actions should speak the loudest. http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920287 http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920287
    • mortenjorck 16y ago
      Fascinating. Knowing Jobs' penchant for secrecy, the Steven P. Jobs Foundation could well exist today, only as a collection of charitable organizations under various names.
• petenixey 16y ago
  I happen to have just watched a brilliant TED talk on the value of angel investment (not aid) in Africa. The talk underlined how it is capitalism rather than charity that creates wealth. It would be wonderful to see some of SV's glitterati create more for-profit investment networks (bigger than Kiva, smaller than VC (...YC?)) in other hungry markets. Kudos to Mark for committing to this. If he applies his product-brilliance to how he goes about it I'm sure he will do wonderful things. (Alexis this has your name written all over it BTW ;)
  • deleted 16y ago
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  • pero 16y ago
    Capitalism creating wealth in Africa? Cruel joke?
    • noonespecial 16y ago
      Nope. Counter-intuitive truth.
      • aik 16y ago
        It isn't even that counter-intuitive. The approach for the longest time was to give aid through food and other basic necessities. Teaching a person how to fish rather than giving him fish clearly produces better results in the long term.
        • muhfuhkuh 16y ago
          This is the "dirty little secret" about the sudden rise in African fortunes in the last decade or so (it is the fastest ascension of the middle class for Africa in... well, ever). And, I know correlation != causation, but it's interesting nonetheless to note that this has happened under unprecedented investment by China in the continent, while investment rates actually shrank in the West (particularly in Europe, which probably is attributable to the financial crisis). This ascension is a marked improvement compared to, say, the efforts of Colonialism (the so-called "scramble for Africa"), Apartheid, and guilt-ridden charity.
• lionhearted 16y ago
  Fantastic. I wonder if all these very public proclamations are going to shift people's attitude towards taxes? Most people think of the government as wasteful, inefficient, incompetent, and corrupt to more or less degrees, and I know I'd prefer to see money allocated by smart people like Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg than by politicians who need to keep constituents happy and win votes. I committed a while back to giving 10% of my income to charity henceforth, probably for my whole life. I know I've felt much better when I raised money for St. Jude's or Grand Ormond Street children's hospitals than when I wrote a check to the IRS to fund the latest special interest-fueled debacle. There's a "the evil rich are against us" narrative in movies and stories a lot, but I wonder if the perception will start to change when all the good from these endeavors is realized. I think it's quite likely that smart people allocating resources intelligently will do 10x, 20x, 50x more good with the money than a politician possibly could.
  • DevX101 16y ago
    I don't like estate taxes. Governments are typically terrible financial stewards and bad examples of financial responsibility. Give the government one billion and it will find a way to spend two. But I also don't like the idea of a permanent aristocratic class where generation after generation are born into opulence because your great grandfather created a great company. The movement towards philanthropy is a great alternative as long there are clearly defined and applied metrics of success. Gates Foundation does a good job at this. If you claim you're going to change the world, but you can't prove it, you won't get funding again.
    • sshumaker 16y ago
      I'd argue one of the points of estate taxes (which are heavily favored by Buffet, Gates, et. al) is to encourage you to will your fortunes to philanthropy - so it doesn't end up in the hands of the government.
      • DevX101 16y ago
        Great point! High estate taxes gives an incentive to the wealthy not to pay estate taxes. The original intent of my argument was that I don't like the idea of handing over half your estate to the government. I suppose the proponents of the high estate tax wanted avoidance of the tax via philanthropy as an intended side effect. Thanks, I never looked at it that way.
• RtodaAV 16y ago
  I wouldn't.
• narrator 16y ago
  I think if Mark wanted to give back to the world he should do what Elon Musk is doing and start high risk businesses that can create widespread beneficial change in the world.
  • petenixey 16y ago
    To be fair I think that's what he just did
  • stretchwithme 16y ago
    by consuming government money making sports cars? Please, no, Mark.
    • tlrobinson 16y ago
      Starting with sports cars seems like a good plan to me. Let the people who can afford to pay a premium help fund development of the technology which can then be used in cheaper cars for the masses. A lot of automobile technology is developed in race cars like Formula 1 many years before making it's way into mainstream cars. I can't comment on the government subsidies though.
      • stretchwithme 16y ago
        of course not. it doesn't matter if government takes over venture funding. its not like they're bad at stuff
  • brown9-2 16y ago
    He's 26. Give him time.
• quizbiz 16y ago
  How much liquid wealth does Mark actually have? Isn't the vast majority of it purely theoretical based on Facebook equity purchases?
  • beeeph 16y ago
    This is a public pledge on his part that he'll give away the majority of his wealth over time, not right this moment. At the moment, I'm not sure the guy owns much of anything besides Facebook stock. Last I read, he rents a little house and drives a paid-off Nissan coupe.
    • jaspero 16y ago
      Simple living high thinking. I bet many people in his position would have already mortgaged a mansion and ultra-luxury car.
      • beeeph 16y ago
        I agree. In fact, I know many broke people who have already mortgaged a mansion and ultra-luxury car.
  • petercooper 16y ago
    It's a great system. We, too, can pledge to give away our theoretical billions.
  • patrickk 16y ago
    Important paragraph in the article: "Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm before dropping out of college and working on the business full time in California, is one of the world's youngest billionaires, worth an estimated $6.9 billion, according to Forbes. Yet since his wealth is from his ownership stake a company that has yet to list on the stock market, much of that wealth is theoretical at this point."
    • quizbiz 16y ago
• meric 16y ago
  This is great; Rather than having government's and or NGO employees who pulls normal salary and aren't experienced in efficiently managing the spending of billions of dollars of development aid and end up harming the recipients, we are now getting the billionaires - people who excel at efficiently investing billions of dollars to reap billions more - to allocate these resources.
• beeeph 16y ago
  Someone once said, "No man is rich enough to buy back his past." If you ask me, this just might do it for Zuck. Congrats Man! I hope you find yourself surprised by how many other young entrepreneurs follow suit. But seriously, do yourself a favor, quit renting your little college house and buy yourself a little home while interest rates are still low.
• yason 16y ago
  If I had billions I would certainly pay great attention to where I would put that money to work in order to create most goodness and wealth out of it. I would be wary of many charities as groups can get as confused from big money as individuals do.
• scorpion032 16y ago
  I wonder if you can buy real groceries using facebook stock, yet.
  • hugh3 16y ago
    Well I'd be willing to give you a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs for, say, 0.1% of the company. So yes.
    • jacques_chester 16y ago
      BREAKING NEWS Facebook valued at 12 billion gallons of milk in private exchanges
• code_duck 16y ago
  I find it odd how people such as Gates and Zuckerberg obsessively stomp down their competition through any means possible, and then turn around and grandiosely pledge to give away their gains.
  • loewenskind 16y ago
    Trying to balance the karma.
  • glhaynes 16y ago
    Many consider it to be the job of the businessperson to do everything they can to help their business' success within the legal framework it exists in. As long as that legal framework is democratically constructed, I don't see any reason to think of that as immoral, so I don't really see any contradiction there.
• minow12 16y ago
  Would be better spent donating that money to research. Technology helps way more people than food stamps do.
• ramanujan 16y ago
  There is at least one billionare who is thinking different: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16792615 http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16792615 That's a story about the eight philanthropies Thiel is funding, which are much more oriented along the lines of "give a man the plans for a new fishing machine" than traditional philanthropy.
• paulitex 16y ago
  Hey Sergey, Larry, and Steve, heads up. These guys all have around the same net worth as Zuck, but much more liquidity. Sergey "don't be evil" Brin's absence from the list is a particularly curious... Anyone know what his philanthropic track record is like? Is it mostly through Google.org?
  • pclark 16y ago
    is not donating to charity evil now? man, thats escalated.
• chopsueyar 16y ago
  Yet since his wealth is from his ownership stake a company that has yet to list on the stock market, much of that wealth is theoretical at this point.
• iterationx 16y ago
  Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.” Another billionaire signs up for Gate's depopulation agenda.
• stretchwithme 16y ago
  After much cajoling, I have agreed to accept it.