Number of words – 1,995
Mark Zuckerberg drives a Volkswagen Golf. He pays himself an annual salary of a dollar. In 2006, at the age of 22, he turned down a billion times that for Facebook. In 2010, when his then-girlfriend (now wife) Priscilla Chan moved in to his home, he posted an update offering their crockery and appliances because they had “2x everything”. He dresses in grey T-shirts and hoodies.
As quiet a life as Zuckerberg and Chan lead in some respects, they are in others fairly conspicuous. And on Tuesday they took an extraordinary action in the most visible way possible. Via an open letter to their new daughter Max (posted, obviously, on Facebook) the Chan Zuckerbergs announced that they would be donating 99% of their Facebook shares to charity during their lifetime. A missive featuring a bullet-pointed mission statement and the phrase “personalised learning tools” may lack the gooey warmth that little Max might have been entitled to expect, but no one can deny its potential impact: at current values, the family’s donation is worth more than $45bn.
If Zuckerberg was already the essential figure of our age – unironic, ruthlessly competitive, post-private – he could now be seen as its Superman, too. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made similarly lavish gestures, but they are relatively old men, disposing of what they have accrued before it’s too late. Zuckerberg is 31. He presumably has many years ahead of him leading Facebook. He has reimagined social behaviour for his generation; now, via this “small contribution”, he has set them their most inescapable altruistic example. His contemporaries may find it a bit weird that he hasn’t starting flying yet.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook post was met, unsurprisingly, with huge acclaim. (Melinda Gates liked it; so did Shakira.) “The first thing is simply to congratulate the Zuckerbergs,” says Sir Tom Hughes-Hallett, a longstanding charity executive and co-founder of the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship at the LSE. “It’s so important to recognise that this is a gift of extraordinary generosity before beginning to analyse it. I’m so excited by it.” Equally unsurprising were levels of snark that a Martian might not anticipate being doled out to people who have just given away 99% of one of the biggest fortunes in the world. “The lamest mission statement in the history of man,” one tweet called it. “Mark Zuckerberg donating 99% of your personal info to charity,” snorted another.
Busy as he presumably is changing nappies, Zuckerberg himself is likely to be unmoved by such critiques. The rest of us can probably agree, twitticisms aside, that a $45bn donation – more than double the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations put together – is pretty generous. All the same, $45bn never comes without strings attached, and once the sniping is dispensed with, there are serious questions to be answered.
There are those who see serious risks in the era of super-giving that started with the Gates Foundation, and who worry that our warm fuzzy feelings are blinding us to the broader implications. “What’s curious is that even benign, obvious criticisms are seen as violating the sacrosanct sphere of private giving,” says Linsey McGoey, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex and author of a book about “philanthrocapitalism” called No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “There’s this idea that there should be no constraints. But the problem is that such gifts exert sway over decision-making that affects the lives of millions. So it needs to be monitored.” By this account, Zuckerberg is less a superman than a chequebook dictator. By figuring out which version is closer to the truth, we’d learn a lot about the king of Silicon Valley, of course, but we’d also learn a lot about how modern philanthropy seeks to change the world.
So how will Zuckerberg be feeling now that his news is out? Those who would see his act as one of genuine altruism will find evidence for their case in his view, reported in the New Yorker, after a gathering with tech industry leaders and Barack Obama. His fellow tech gurus were, Zuckerberg apparently felt, too focused on their pet issues, instead of a wider public-interest agenda. “There’s this huge moral component,” he later said. “We might as well go after all of it.” If he is genuinely so motivated, he’ll be excited, says Richard Ross, chairman of the Rosetrees Trust, who donated £23m of his £100m fortune to charity earlier this year – but a little daunted, too. “It’s very hard,” he explains. “It’s like landing in a foreign land. You don’t know where anything is or what you want to do: you just know you have to explore.”
As Zuckerberg does so, he will presumably lean on the example of Bill Gates: the language in the letter to Max mirrors some of the terms that the Gates Foundation set out. But Gates isn’t the only model for Zuckerberg (who is, of course, not new to philanthropy himself, either). In recent years, a growing number of young Silicon Valley executives have made vast donations to charity; as they’ve done so, they’ve refined a model that Sean Parker, founder of Napster and Zuckerberg’s one-time mentor, christened “hacker philanthropy” in a Wall Street Journal article earlier this year. Three of the six most generous philanthropists in the US last year were in their 30s, and in tech: as Zuckerberg grows up, building a family and finding a bigger purpose, Silicon Valley seems to be growing up with him. And, perhaps, it’s finding grander status symbols, too: when you’re so rich that a private jet seems a bit downmarket, it may be that the only way to project your triumph is to wear scruffy clothes and give it all away.
“That’s brilliant,” says Beth Breeze, director of the centre for philanthropy at the University of Kent. “If they’re visible, they’re role models. If you want to be successful in the 21st century, it isn’t just about making a load of money, it’s about getting rid of it. It’s a million miles from the ‘Loadsamoney’ caricature I grew up with.”
Whatever motivates them, these new philanthropists aren’t happy with the model for altruism that they’ve inherited. In his WSJ article, Parker, dismissing traditional philanthropy as “largely antiquated” and motivated by “safe” gifts that result in the chance to “name buildings”, described a new approach that would be at ease with failure, agile, and sceptical of received wisdom – just as its proponents had been in tech. “They’re much more comfortable with risk,” says Breeze. “This is not an easy area: trying to do something about intense social problems outside of the state and outside of the market. If they take a risk and they learn from it, that’s held up as a success. The willingness to talk about failure is another part of their gift.”
When generosity on such a scale and on such terms is so new, it’s not surprising that things can go wrong. Zuckerberg, for his part, has already been burned: his $100m gift to improve schools in Newark, New Jersey was met with furious objections from locals who felt that their needs had been ignored by distant grandees holding the purse strings.
That sort of problem may indicate that Parker’s contempt for the existing models is a bit premature; indeed, whereas one critic of the Newark scheme called it something that was “done to people rather than in cooperation with people”, the letter to Max was careful to signal a far more collegiate approach this time around. According to Hughes-Hallett, in general, those useful failures aren’t being well enough scrutinised yet, which is partly why the LSE’s Marshall Institute has been founded. “There is very little scope for new philanthropists to identify centres of excellence,” he says, “whereas in their corporate life when they want to increase their return on equity, there is a queue of people to help them. Very little academic rigour has been brought to bear on this.”
Listening more is a good start, then. But look at the detail of the Chan Zuckerberg announcement and you’ll see that well-intentioned promises to pay closer attention to the people who best know what’s needed aren’t the only innovation this time around. Instead of a traditional foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be a limited-liability company, and that will mean that Max’s parents are allowed to invest in for-profit companies, which they believe are the most effective means of driving the innovation that will change the world – and to use their money for political activism, too. The Chan Zuckerbergs say that this is vital: “We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates,” they tell their presumably baffled baby. “Many institutions are unwilling to do this, but progress must be supported by movements to be sustainable.”
Which seems to make sense, but sets off some alarms. “It frees him from these constraints, and it heightens concerns that there is zero check on a private individual’s ability to influence decision-making,” says McGoey. “If it was the Koch brothers pledging $45bn towards an effort to monitor every Muslim in the US, that would raise immediate concerns.” Few will see Zuckerberg’s fuzzy broad aims – “advancing human potential” and “promoting equality” – as too controversial. On the other hand, consider his well-publicised view, repeated in the letter, that the internet is an unalloyed good; and then consider the more controversial principle that Facebook seeks to enforce – that life is there to be shared. Zuckerberg means well, no doubt; on the other hand, sometimes there’s a detectable messianic tendency that not everyone will be comfortable with. (At school, he loved the Aeneid, he once said, and its story of a man’s quest to build a city that “knows no boundaries in time and greatness”.) It isn’t hard to imagine how the idea of an “internet for everybody” could overlap with the idea of “Facebook for everybody”, giving charitable cover to a more self-interested end.
Others don’t have much time for that view. “Of course anything’s dangerous if someone is extreme,” says Richard Ross. “But there’s nothing in the world that can only be used for good. People like him, with specialist knowledge and skills and so much to give, they’re going to get good results. And maybe they inspire others. There are thousands of people with wealth between 10 million and a billion. If a little bit of that could be channelled, if these people set in process a train of thought in other people, over time, it can be massive.”
At the heart of the dispute, perhaps, is philanthropy’s operative weirdness: the use of private, selfishly acquired means to achieve public, altruistic goals. By one argument, it’s their money, and they can do what they like with it – and the very idea that they should be criticised for not spending it perfectly is as absurd as ticking them off for buying the wrong yacht. But, by another, if an individual is playing a role that should arguably be fulfilled by the state, perhaps they should be subjected to the same oversight as the state. Or perhaps we might view such a huge gift as similar to a great work of art: bearing the indelible stamp of its creator, but ultimately belonging to the world, and therefore subject to the world’s interpretation and scrutiny.
At the moment, that question is moot: Zuckerberg can largely do what he likes with it. His previous extraordinary philanthropy gives plenty of reason for optimism, whatever mis-steps there have been along the way. What will he do now? Can he manage his great gift without letting the political seep into the charitable? How will he change the world next? No one quite knows – except for him. “Most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right?” he once said. “And that’s not out there to be indexed.”
Excerpted from The Guardian dated Dec 2015 – ‘Facebook shares: what’s behind Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘hacker philanthropy’?’