Mark Zuckerberg and Wife Pledge 99% of Their Facebook Shares to Charity
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, at the White House in September. They announced on Facebook the birth of their daughter, Max. Molly Riley/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark
Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced
on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their
Facebook shares “during our lives” — holdings currently worth $45 billion — to
charitable purposes.
The
pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born
a week ago.
Mr.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, said they were forming a new
organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to manage the money. “Our initial
areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people
and building strong communities,” they wrote.
In a
securities filing, Facebook said Mr. Zuckerberg planned “to sell or gift no
more than $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years.” He
intends to retain his majority voting position in the company’s stock for the
foreseeable future.
Earlier
this week, Mr. Zuckerberg was one of the billionaires who signed on to the
Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group organized by the Microsoft co-founder
Bill Gates to contribute toward a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund. The
announcement coincided with a Paris summit meeting intended to forge a global
accord to cut planet-warming emissions.
Mr.
Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have recently made visible investments and gifts in
several kindergarten-through-high-school education projects.
In May,
AltSchool, a private school start-up in San Francisco that develops
personalized learning technologies, announced that it had raised $100 million
from a group of investors, including a donor-advised fund financed by the
Zuckerbergs at the Silicon Valley Community Association.
In
September, Facebook announced that it was working with Summit Public Schools,
a charter
school network, to develop an on online platform to help tailor
education to the needs and interests of individual students.
And in
November, EducationSuperhighway, a nonprofit group that helps K-12 schools tap
federal funds for high-speed classroom Internet connections, announced that the
couple had agreed to donate $20 million to its work.
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