Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan are officially parents — and pretty darn generous, too.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Have Their Baby, Promise to Give Away Their Facebook Fortune
That’s billions and billion and billions.
Facebook
Zuckerberg posted a letter to his Facebook profile Tuesday welcoming his new daughter, Max, to the world. In the letter, Zuckerberg outlined a number of ways he and Chan would like to help better the world, including promoting equality and helping to provide health care to those in need.
The plan of attack: Lots and lots of money. Zuckerberg said that he will donate 99 percent of his Facebook shares — valued at close to $45 billion — over his lifetime. Here’s a snippet from the letter.
As you begin the next generation of the Chan Zuckerberg family, we also begin the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation. Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.
We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to advance this mission. We know this is a small contribution compared to all the resources and talents of those already working on these issues. But we want to do what we can, working alongside many others.
The donation, which will eventually include Zuckerberg’s Class B voting shares, doesn’t mean he’s leaving Facebook or relinquishing control anytime soon. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing after his Facebook post, Zuckerberg outlined the plan for his charitable gift: He has created a foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC, in which he will control all the shares and allocations of those shares.
In other words, Zuckerberg is creating a charitable trust that’s entirely under his control, a common move among billionaires.
Update: As an LLC, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not actually a charitable trust, which stipulates all money must go to an actual charity. As BuzzFeed points out, this means Zuckerberg can spend money wherever he believes it will fit into his mission. A spokesperson confirmed the distinction, saying the LLC was “focused on social good.”
In his letter, Zuckerberg wrote that he plans to “continue to serve as Facebook’s CEO for many, many years to come.” That was reiterated in the filing. “[Zuckerberg] intends to retain his majority voting position in our stock for the foreseeable future,” the document reads.
Zuckerberg is quite the giver and has been donating millions around the Bay Area for years. He and Chan gave $20 million in November to EducationSuperHighway to bring better wireless Internet to schools, and earlier this year donated $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital. He is also part of Bill Gates’s new Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a multi-billion dollar initiative to back clean energy.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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