Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t live by the rules. A week after his first baby was born, he announced to her and the world that he and wife Priscilla Chan will give away 99 per cent of his 462 million shares in Facebook, currently valued at $45 billion, to causes they hold dear. Whether in starting so early in philanthropy — he is just 31 — or in the form that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will take or its causes, Zuckerberg is treading new paths.
Zuckerberg’s “gift” is not charity as we know it, but it may well become the new model of philanthropy. By establishing the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as a limited liability company, not a non-profit foundation, he will give his money but he will decide what purposes it serves. CZI will promote “personalised learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities” by investing in companies, lobbying for legislation and seeking to influence public policy debates.
America’s robber barons of another age created the charitable foundations — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford — that made America as we know it, its great universities, its hospitals, its think tanks. The likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg may well be making tomorrow’s America. In India we can only wonder why we have so few givers. Of course, there are the Tatas, an NRN here, an Azim Premji there, but where are the givers from our robber-baron age?
