The truth about Facebook founders billion gave.

The truth about Facebook founders  billion gave.

ANALYSIS: Mark Zuckerberg moves 99 percent of its assets from Facebook to privately controlled company to make charity, lobbying and investment.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan with their newborn daughter Max

Very rich people are often very eccentric.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan got in the past week, their first child, daughter Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.

They took the opportunity to write an open letter to their little daughter, which they announced that they will sell 99 percent of the shares that make up their assets, and put the money in a private company called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC.

The capital accounts for 45 billion dollars (310 billion. DKR.), Then little will be back to little Max, although the majority of assets must be used to make the world a better place to grow up.

A tradition of rich men….

Mark Zuckerberg writes hereby into a tradition composed of men of wealth as oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, industrialist Fred C. Koch and børsmagnaten C. Warren Buffet, who all wrote similar letters to their children because they were worried that their gigantic fortune would destroy the lives of children and their opportunity to create an empire from scratch as their fathers.

In the age of social media is the letter public with a video with the happy parents in the nursery. Total transparency as Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it.

The obvious media history was that Zuckerberg gives all his money away to charity in the form of “personalized learning, curing diseases, connect people and create strong communities,” as it says in the letter and video.

Zuckerberg promised in 2010 with Bill Gates to donate his fortune to charity. Since then, Zuckerberg and Chan given money to American school projects and the fight against Ebola.
Zuckerberg puts not his money in a fund

The new project is more than a philanthropic fund. Firstly, it is not organized as a foundation, but as a limited liability company – a company with limited liability. It will in Danish context means that the owners’ financial liability to third parties is limited to the made deposits in the company and that Zuckerberg is not liable with his personal assets.

On the other hand retains Zuckerberg control of the company and what it invests in. The money is not out of his control, as they would be in a fund. It also means that Zuckerberg does not get any tax benefits by transferring their Facebook Shares and place them in the new company. In return, he according to the New York Times achieve other tax advantages by giving away shares in the new company to charity. Which Zuckerberg even elaborates in a blog post.

But why he chooses the model?
Zuckerberg retain control of assets

First to retain control of the assets. If you look deeper into his purposes described, then holds it beyond pure philanthropic projects also the possibility of political lobbying and “other activities in favor of civil society”, as it is called, and the desire to invest in both non-profit and for-profit companies. Here are all the investments that can provide return and not clean gifts and a desire for political influence on key issues. It would not be possible for a charitable foundation.

Unlike a fund, the legal form adopted not been forced to spend a certain amount each year or pay a public accounting. Here, in other words, very little of the total transparency that Zuckerberg preaches Facebook users.

From one pocket to another……

Critics of Facebook might want to focus on that Zuckerberg may use the money to place the social media and its business better in the political landscape, but we read the letter to her daughter Max, so it might as well be a desire to influence politicians to for example. to support the project code.org which are intended to school children learn to program. Or to invest in green energy, as he has just announced along with Bill Gates.

Mark Zuckerberg has therefore not given 310 billion to charity. He has just moved his money from one deep pocket to another that is slightly darker. Whether he uses the money to his daughter or our common good, as he promises, only time will tell. The decision about what the money will be used is in fact still quite his own.

Whatever the case, as has Mark Zuckerberg again proved that he is one of his generation’s most talented business men with perfect sense of branding and publicity.

Perhaps he is also a good father.