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Mark Zuckerberg Gives $990 Million To Charity
mrspoonsi writes with this excerpt from Business Insider: "This morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to give 18 million Facebook shares to charity by the end of the month. Facebook is currently trading at $55 per share, so Zuckerberg's gift is worth just under $1 billion. The money will go toward Zuckerberg's foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and The Breakthrough Prize In Life Science, a [Nobel] Prize-like award. Zuckereberg is giving his shares away as part of a secondary stock offering from Facebook. Reuters says Zuckerberg will sell 41.4 million shares, reducing his voting power in the company from 58.8% to 56.1%. Other insiders selling include board member Marc Andreessen, who will sell 1.65 million shares. Facebook is selling 27 million."
to his own charity?
TFA Headline was misleading...saying it like this:
"X gives [huge sum of money] to charity."
X being an often criticized figure and "charity" being the incongruent thing that supposedly makes the headline interesting.
But it buries the lead...the story isn't some tech/dork/genius/villain giving a huge sum of money away to needy people...it's about him transferring it to his own charity.
Huge difference.
Jerry Sandusky used the Second Mile Charity to find victims. Clinton uses his charity to maintain his personal/family brand and...I admit...do good things. Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
IMHO, Gates and Zuck are bad models for tech chartiy. I would rather him take that money and pay off every home mortgage in the poor communities in his area....Oakland. The also need to stop all attempts to use his charity to get student data via "donating" some student info system and calling it some innovative name.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Hell, say what you will about Shumckaberg, but it looks like this was a good move. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation does good work as far as I can tell. It's not like he's investing back into technology or anything else that will do him any direct good - again, as far as I can tell.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Check the "Silicon Valley Community Foundation" web page, and you'll see it's not a charity --- it's a big-money investment firm that manages accounts for other big-money charities. This is part of the move to make "charity" a highly profitable enterprise for big business; ways to shuffle around tax-sheltered billions invested in scummy megacorporations.
Similar to other $B folks it goes to their own foundation so they can still control that money to drive whatever cause they wish. In this case it sounds like they just print more share for it..? Or FB as a whole provide that share... i.e. all FB shareholders chip it for Mr. Zuckerberg to play?
Usually the complain is that they give away MS software licenses. The conspiracy there being that they'll be hooked and once they move beyond soul crushing poverty they'll pay for the software. And that's disgusting when he should be giving out free IBM and RedHat contracts so that those vendors will be contractors when the children stop having to eat dirt to keep the hunger pangs away. The other big complaint I've seen is that they've invested in a refinery or something. As we all know, oil companies are evil and the last thing Africa needs is more local industry.
Basically, the problem is that he's Bill Gates, and that's a bad thing. Every dollar M$ made is tainted blood money. They made Dell pay a site license for Windows installation! Have you forgotten the burned villages of the Browser Wars? Remember that time they sent anthrax to that Linux User's Group? We are all victims. No amount of malaria vaccinations and AIDS research and all that other shit could ever atone for such depraved crimes.
http://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/bill-gates-loses-worlds-richest-title-after-giving-28-billion-to-charity-1324573/
28 > 1.
And that was 2011.
and other commenters have pointed out similar things...
first, i'll grant you that my comment did not mention some of the work they do for the neediest globally, it is an oversight that should matter in evaluating "tech billionaires" and how effective/self-serving their charity work proves to be.
I'm mostly frustrated that so much of what made M$ so bad is going into **how** they do the work in the developing world, on a macro scale, but this is off topic.
second, to my main criticism of "tech billionaires" and how they do charity is how self-serving and low-return *most* of it is.
I imagine the parts of the Gates Foundation that are the most effective correlate very closely with the parts where Gates & minions have the *least* input into decision making.
Delivering water to communities in Africa is more a problem you throw money at to the right people, because there are obviously already people trying to accomplish the task, the best option just doesn't have the resources.
That's still **good** but we can do much, much better. That's my point.
Why not start right in the Bay Area? Why not just start paying off family mortgages and boosting school budgets?
990 Million Dollars of that...seriously...i'm not an isolationist but have you ever heard of how in a commercial airliner emergency, the mother should put *her own air mask* on first b/c she needs to be coherent to help the baby?
Nation building begins at home!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I'm too busy using 5% of my net worth to pay for things like food, clothing, my mortgage, gas, insurance, etc. Along with the other 95% of my net worth.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I sure prefer to see it spent this way then surreptitiously funding political activity through tax exempt organizations like George Soros.
Mostly in the tax treatment of the donation. Donating the $990 million in shares avoids having to sell the shares and getting the cap gains tax, then donating the remaining money.
The charity sells the shares instead and gets the full value instead of the reduced value, and Zuck gets to deduct the market value of the stocks instead of the value reduced by the cap gains tax.
Really it's a win for the charity to get the shares rather than the cash. For Zuck the end result is pretty much the same.
Average working stiffs can do pretty much the same thing by setting up a Donor Advised Fund and donating shares to them. This has the added benefit of bunching the funds into one year for tax purposes. You can then distribute the money to charities over time.
This sounds vaguely like a 'capitalist economics is an inescapable force of nature' argument, but conveyed needlessly cryptically.
What exactly are you trying to say?