Mark Zuckerberg Gives $990 Million To Charity 230
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."
so he gave (Score:5, Informative)
to his own charity?
Re:so he gave (Score:5, Insightful)
So did Bill Gates. And Bill Clinton. Those two at least do some good work.
oh boy... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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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.
I would rather have a more egalitarian world, where money does not accumulate obscenely like that.
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You DO realize money is just a convenient form of energy, right?
...what? (Score:3)
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?
Re:...what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and laid them out, end-to-end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion?
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As I remember it Gates didn't give a damn about charities until the Microsoft anti-trust trial was underway. It was a PR move.
I could be wrong though, feel free to jump in if you have citations otherwise.
--
Hey, ACs need sigs too!
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates gained a soul when he got married. Finally getting laid mellows you out.
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's actually far more insightful than I think you intended.
Having a spouse means you're forced to consider another perspective, which in turn makes it easier to understand and empathize with others you're not related to. Life isn't just about pursuing your own goals any more, but suddenly there's a concern for helping everyone. Perhaps not all the way to meeting their goals, but at least living long and well enough to have a chance.
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a spouse means you're forced to consider another perspective, which in turn makes it easier to understand and empathize with others you're not related to.
Alternatively, having a spouse and family makes it much harder to understand and empathise with those outside of that family. "Old money" refers to this - people preferentially give money to those they are related to, to the detriment of others. Massive family fortunes have been accumulated and held on to this way, and have been influential despite those currently being in control being incompetent.
People who don't have spouses and family are _more_ forced to consider other perspectives, because they actually decide what will happen to their money when they die, rather than just passing it on.
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Re:oh boy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Citations in response to a non-cited and subjective post?
PR people are a lot cheaper than billion dollar foundations. And PR for what? A retired guy? Who cares? If this was a PR move why keep it going?
In the end he is giving. There isn't a timetable for this and he isn't required to do it at all.
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PR people are a lot cheaper than billion dollar foundations.
True, but PR people can't effectively bribe 3rd-world governments into avoiding Linux and buying Windows - at least not as much as you can with "donations" from your "charity" to El Presidente's wife's own "charity". See also Mexico.
And PR for what? A retired guy? Who cares?
He's not quite retired, eh?
If this was a PR move why keep it going?
For highly-driven people, retirement doesn't mean saying 'aww screw it' and letting one's entire life's work to do whatever it wants to. Doubly so if the vast majority of your money is tied up in the continued stock/corporate performance of that life's
Re: oh boy... (Score:4, Informative)
It's not like he did a sham transfer to a strawman. He transferred them to his foundation, irrevocably. Just because the foundation has his name doesn't mean he gets anything from it. Aside from getting to vote the shares the way he and the rest of the board agree, the shares are gone to him - any appreciation, all dividends, they all are for the bill and Melinda gates foundations benefit, and that organization publicly discloses their tax return so you can verify that.
Creating and funding that foundation did nothing with regards to microsofts antitrust case, except make bill a lot less rich (but still in the top 3)
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It's not like he did a sham transfer to a strawman. He transferred them to his foundation, irrevocably. Just because the foundation has his name doesn't mean he gets anything from it.
Well, technically he could make himself a board member of that foundation (if he isn't already), give himself a massive salary, etc...
After all, trusts and foundations are among the oldest tax dodges in financial history, you know?
Re:oh boy... (Score:4, Informative)
From what I read, his father (an IBM lawyer!) shamed him into it.
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Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's giving the stock, not money. When he monetizes the stock is when he'd get killed in taxes. The Foundation can then sell the stock for cash tax-free but is under a lot of regulation as to what can be done with the money. Taxes in America make this the only reasonable way for the wealthy to "give." You can't do things like pay off other people's mortgages without a massive tax burden both ways. (Having your mortgage paid off by someone else is income.) Blame the IRS for these goofy constructs, not th
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Blame congress for making the rules that the IRS *has* to play by.
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Gates demanding that people and governments sign long term contracts with US Agriculture and Medical corporations and not produce or grow locally as a condition of receiving his "Free" medicine is a benefit to society? Who's society are you referring to, the starving people in Ethiopia that can't grow local food any more because they received "Free vaccines"?
Good grief man, use your head just a little. If Mr. Gates was really just "helping everyone with his money" why has his wealth continued to grow while the people he is supposedly helping go further down in poverty? Some of the vaccines being pushed overseas are illegal in numerous Western Countries after being proven harmful to recipients.
Your view of an "awesome model" seems to be very low and abstract.
More on topic, look for Facebook to report some major loss in value causing the stocks to drop. Zuckerberg is not the only one donating lots of stock. These people are not idiots, and didn't get to be as wealthy as they are because they are altruistic.
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
His wealth has continued to grow irrespective of any of that, I'm sure, due to a massive spread of investments.
However, I can't find any reference to these contracts stipulating restrictions on food growth or the alleged unsafe vaccines. Do you have a source for either of those? I'd like to follow that up.
In any place receiving these vaccines, wouldn't it be a headache to enforce that kind of contract anyway given the state of the local judicial system?
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How do you function without knowing the meaning of common words?
altruism (n): the principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others
One can be altruistic, and still gain wealth. You may be claiming that he is only funding Gates foundation as this is the best means of producing more wealth, but that would take a severe misunderstanding of investing & economics.
Oh, and still waiting on that evidence that gates's foundation is suppressing local farming....
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So the action words are what lose you? Verbs are hard? Honestly, this is not my lesson to learn. "He gives away all of his money to help others" can NOT be true of the person is in fact GAINING WEALTH. It is impossible. Now will you come back and argue that "he" needs to be properly defined?
Now if the fact is that he is gaining in wealth clicks, and you get that there is a perpetrated lie of "him giving away money" you will see that the altruism people associate with Bill Gates is also a lie.
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Wait a minute AC. I realize that Google searches can be difficult, but this [google.com] did not require any playing with keywords to find. Tell me how much money he is giving away when his wealth has continued to increase by "BILLIONS" of dollars annually!
From Forbes we have Bill Gates' net worth rose $6 billion from last March due to gains in his investment portfolio; his holdings include tech hygiene firm Ecolab, waste collector Republic Services and Mexican Coke bottler FEMSA. In February the first 12 non-American
Re:oh boy... (Score:4, Interesting)
This document https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/agricultural-development-strategy-overview.pdf [gatesfoundation.org] from the gates foundation would lead one to believe that they are promoting local farmers, not suppressing them.
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An AC posted this elsewhere in this thread: http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,290910,full.story [latimes.com]
Doesn't mention contract lock-ins; does describe how the foundation invests in the very companies which are the source of the problems its charitable works are meant to reduce.
I'm reminded of the old medieval practice of buying forgiveness for your sins.
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Stop pointing out that Bill Gates is a money grubbing asshole.
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Why?
Apple used to sell their OS for $20; now 10.9 and all future OS versions are free. Microsoft wants ~ $100+ for Win7/Win8. Microsoft wants $100/year for Office 365.
Will Apple is no saint, Bill Gates was responsible for Microsoft nickeling and diming customers every chance they get.
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Why?
Apple used to sell their OS for $20; now 10.9 and all future OS versions are free. Microsoft wants ~ $100+ for Win7/Win8. Microsoft wants $100/year for Office 365.
Will Apple is no saint, Bill Gates was responsible for Microsoft nickeling and diming customers every chance they get.
http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-might-drop-licensing-fees-windows-phone
MS is considering dropping license fees for Windows Phone and Windows RT. So you're ... So it's really ...
So there.
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It was sarcasm.
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Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
His charity also does a ton of good stuff in areas like public health and sanitation. He's not a saint, he may be doing it primarily as a PR move, but that's definitely doing more good for the world than having it just sitting in some trust fund for his 3 kids or something. And yes, he could have also given it to a bunch of organizations rather than creating a foundation of his own, but my impression from those who have done work in the area where his foundation operates is that they have a fairly good reputation as far as non-profits go.
I don't like Bill Gates' business tactics. I do like what he's chosen to do with a lot of his time and money.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Score:3)
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 macr
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So you're saying there shouldn't be any standards for whether a teacher does their job? They should just be able to show up and get paid? Where do I sign up?
Also, while Bill does push his Microsoft bent, his charity does provide tons of money for vaccinations and education in poor countries.
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The thing is with teachers, especially in under-achieving schools, the community and students don't show up.
My wife taught in Detroit for a while. Half her class missed half their classroom time over the course of a school year. Is it her fault that all those kids have low test scores (if they even show up on testing day)? It's the same at many of the under-achieving schools around the US. The kids and parents don't show up.
Perhaps if you tried looking into the problem rather than rattling off overly genera
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It is silly to rate the performance of teachers by the performance of their students.
It is equally silly to suggest that teachers shouldn't be rated by their job performance.
Re:oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but the current model for "evaluating teacher performance" is giving kids a lot of standardized tests (designed by Pearson and other big companies and not evaluated by any third party). Teachers whose students do poorly on the tests are claimed to have done a bad job - regardless if said students are English Second Language students or have special needs that might interfere with test taking. Furthermore, since teachers' jobs are tied to the results of these tests, they wind up teaching to the test. Any time spent covering items that won't appear on the test is time spent risking your job.
Of course, the whole testing system is designed to punish public school teachers and push business-owned, for-profit, publicly financed charter schools (which all too often don't require a background in education to teach), but that's a different rant.
(I have two kids in elementary school dealing with the whole Common Core/EngageNY/high stakes testing nonsense so I know first-hand what this is doing to our kids and teachers.)
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I concur. I took my 12 year olds test. Just to see what it was like. It covered his school year quite well and was focused on the things the kids that age should be learning. It did lack some art and music sections, but was very strong in reasoning and analytical skills. And teaching to the test as far as I can tell, means making sure that you cover a number of basic subjects thoroughly. Esp. math and reading. Also kids with special needs have the scores factored out. Schools are required to provide IEPs fo
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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.
And you know, curing polio, fighting AIDS, TB and malaria, etc.
Lets not leave out the the stuff that saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year.
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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.
Uhm, no. He has done some tinkering with that in the US, and has been slammed for it here--rightly, in my opinion. But his real focus has been fighting disease in the 3rd world--childhood vaccinations and anti-malaria efforts, and those are hugely worthy efforts.
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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.
I'm sorry, but using M$ as a shortening for Microsoft, you have just discounted any quality opinion about Bill Gates, his charity or Microsoft.
It's not just the use of M$ that irks me, it is also those who shorten company names to their stock symbols. Using GOOG does not make it easier to get your point across when discussing Google. AAPL only shortens your sentence by one letter. Unless you're discussing the companies as investment entities, then there is no reason to use their stock symbol as the referenc
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Yes, you may subscribe to my newsletter where I communication at great lengths. It is, in my opinion, quite an interesting read. You might be delighted to know that I was already planning my next issue to be about idiosyncratic rules for communication.
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word.
i'm sure it will be pretty interesting...if you post a link I might even take a look
i'll use 'M$' as an abbreviation until the day I die and no blog, Oxford English Bullshit, or w/e will change that...
as for why, its part of how the internet allows for different modes of communication to layer meaning...i think it's cool, and I experiment with different things to see the effect
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Private charities come in two variants.
The first are a thin veil for a tax dodge. Set up a charity, pay yourself fat fees, transfer wealth capital gains free while retaining voting rights, give cash to the local opera and get sweet exclusive access, make sure the back 40 acres of your house remains undeveloped to protect your view and not pay property taxes. It can be useful for social climbing.
The second is that you have a concern and you want to remain hands on. I will point to Bill Gates and Carnegie. Bo
Re:so he gave (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work in finance, managing accounts for those "tax dodge" charities. It's pretty clear you don't actually know how they work.
You're right on the surface, of course... as long as you control your own foundation, you have control over those voting rights and the development of that lot. The devil's in the details, though. You don't have control as you, but as an agent of the foundation. That means that the donated assets are not a part of your own estate, and you personally don't own them any more. You can't transfer money back to yourself (as those "fat fees" run afoul of the charity's tax-free status), you can't build a vineyard on those 40 acres, and you can't pass on the charity to your heirs.
Those foundations are their own entities, and they must be managed separately. It's actually pretty hard to use them for your own financial gain. You can, however, use them to improve your standing in the community, but you don't really need money for that [wikipedia.org].
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Well, that is probably not the best way. Bond fraud is not the in thing these days but I hear that dot coms are making a comeback.
On to the technical issues. Most foundations, if we are weighing by size, are run legitimately. However, there are a lot of rinky family foundations that are not.
Sadly I have seen money transferred back to the owners. Spouses and children are given high paying low responsibility jobs in the foundation. Foundations buy overpriced services from the founder’s family; Investmen
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And I made a mistake. The super voting right Ford Stock is owned by the Ford Family Trust, no the Ford Foundation. So that example is a bust. There are others out there.
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Those two at least do some good work.
If you're into crushing competition through litigation and signing trade agreements that screw up your entire economy, sure.
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best way to avoid tax
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Correct. Gates has one of the biggest tax dodges in history.
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Is he financially better off by giving away stock?
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How is giving stock avoiding taxes? Giving away a billion dollars in stock is far more wealth than if he sold the stock and paid the taxes on it. I hate to break this to people but the super rich are not nearly as worried about taxes as you think they are.
Giving stock is avoiding taxes because you avoid the capital gains, and the loss/transfer can be counted against REAL wealth.
You see, stock is actually pretty much worthless when it comes to conversion to every day uses. Its value has no stability, and you can rarely use it to directly purchase things you actually need/want. At the end of the day, stock is just the ability to have a certain percentage of say in how a corporation is run. People speculate on these voting shares, with some people willing to
Re:so he gave (Score:5, Insightful)
Horrible way to avoid paying taxes.
If MZ sold his stock he would keep 72%. Assuming his cost basis was $0 and a tax rate of 28%
By giving his stock away he keeps 0%. I mean, yes, you do stick it to the man by not paying taxes but you would have the same effect if you burned large piles of money.
MZ probably has other motives for giving his money away then avoiding paying taxes.
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You're not operating under the assumption that all rich people are evil and incapable of doing anything without personal gain. Most of the people in this thread are.
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Zuckerberg signed "The Giving Pledge" organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. He promised to give at least half of his wealth to charity, either during his life or in his will. So he has no intention of spending that $40B.
http://mashable.com/2010/12/09/mark-zuckerberg/
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I am still thinking of Creating the MFM foundation. (Money for Me) It is a good cause, I will use your money to give myself a better life and such improvements will help my local economy.
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to his own charity?
And then less than 5% of his net worth/stocks. It reduced his voting by a little over 2% and
he's keeping more than half of it so he's giving less than 1% of his voting power to a charity
he controls. 1 billion is a quite impressive, but as a percentage of his wealth it is nothing
and add to that the fact that he's basically giving it to himself, it's not much at all. At least
when Bill Gates gave it to himself he gave a substantial percentage. Warren Buffet I believe
is giving 5% of his net worth per year t
tax shelter or buying a legacy? (Score:2)
A tax move or trying to buy a legacy... I wonder. This reminds me of the story of the founding of the Nobel Prize.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#History [wikipedia.org]
Charity (Score:3, Insightful)
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The Silicon Valley Community Foundation does good work as far as I can tell.
What, pray tell? They're not directly a charity, but an investment firm with charities as clients. In other words, someone else gives the money; someone else does the actual charity work. They just sit in the middle, getting to wield billions of dollars of dollars of other people's money for investments that bolster billionaires' agendas (while claiming the credit for other people's charity).
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Not a charity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Not a charity (Score:4, Insightful)
The insertion of middlemen (carrying out the will of billionaires) is common, but that doesn't make it good or charitable to be a self-serving corporatist middleman, wielding dollars for the glorification and enrichment of billionaires. I'm sure there's at least one person getting "fed" at the end of this process: Zuckerberg. Probably several cronies and nephews of cronies handed out six-figure-salary part-time jobs high in the organization, too. Giving money to yourself to further your own interests: not charity, even if you insinuate yourself as a middleman for other nominally charitable institutions (using their funds to further the interests of your own stock portfolio). Making the world a safer, friendlier place for the Zuckerbergs to control every aspect of society is not a net win for humanity.
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How many charities could actually deal with nearly a billion dollars being left on their doorstep on their own?
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Probably most of them that already deal with similar amounts of money. They'd at least know how to hand it to a bank or investment firm. I would not consider said bank or investment firm to themselves be a charity for managing the billion dollars. SVCF is an investment firm for clients who happen to be charities --- which allows them to wield billions of borrowed dollars to invest in things that will also benefit their billionaire "benefactors." Think "hedge fund with massive tax breaks and corporate PR/mon
That wasn't his pocket change (Score:2)
It was his pocket lint. His pocket change is much more.
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This donation is 5% of his net worth. That's a lot more than pocket change. I'll bet you have never donated 5% of your net worth.
Can we please just let people do good things without being cynical assholes about it?
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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.
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That's fine. But how about not shitting on the people who are donating a ton of money to good causes.
Left pocket to right pocket (Score:3)
Shares? (Score:2)
Hope they sell them fast (Score:2)
You mean, Zuck gets up to an 85% tax break? Cool. (Score:2)
I once considered setting up a 501(c)3 so my distributed gamedev platform project could accept donations, but I decided against it (the world's governments are not ready for citizens to have a communal OS, yet). If you're a charity you can allocate most of the donations as administration fees and a small fraction for the actual charity work. "Nonprofit" is the biggest misnomer I've ever seen, 501(c)3's are some of the most profitable business models I've encountered, apart from artificial information scar
MZ is Worth, whatever he says he is worth. (Score:2)
So if $1 billion is worth 3%, than that means:
Facebook is apparently worth $34 Billion.
$20 Billion of that being Enron's, I mean Mark's, personal fortune.
Convince one rube, you might make $50 bucks.
Convince a thousand, you might make a living.
Convince everyone, and you can make whatever you say that you do.
Is it charity if it's a deduction? (Score:2)
I'd like to see how the donation is reported. I guess it's good that these guys donate so much to charity, but the tax code makes it a no-brainer; financially and for PR.
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And thats the point. By making it a no brainer you make sure it happens.
Yes, it means the guy has absolutely no moral high ground, because the benefit of mankind was NOT his first reason for doing this...
but at the same time, it still happened and it will help some people.
Open Source OS/2 Foundation (Score:2)
Better here than political (Score:4, Interesting)
I sure prefer to see it spent this way then surreptitiously funding political activity through tax exempt organizations [opensecrets.org] like George Soros.
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There have been plenty of very wealthy individuals who create foundations Rockefeller [rockefelle...dation.org], Ford [fordfoundation.org], now Gates and Zuckerberg. They can do a lot of good, arguably more than Ted Turner [borgenproject.org] donating $1B to the UN.
I sure prefer to see it spent this way then surreptitiously funding political activity through tax exempt organizations [opensecrets.org] like George Soros.
The difference is that Ted Turner made his donation from his personal assets. Zuckerberg is having Facebook issue the stock from it's shares on hand. So, in reality, it is Facebook that is making the donation, not Zuckerberg and the donation is being made to Zuckerberg's charity.
No, he didnt (Score:2)
He gave shares, not money. There is a difference.
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Mostly in the tax treatment of the donation. Donating the $990 million in shares avoids having to sell the shares and getting the cap gains tax, then donating the remaining money.
The charity sells the shares instead and gets the full value instead of the reduced value, and Zuck gets to deduct the market value of the stocks instead of the value reduced by the cap gains tax.
Really it's a win for the charity to get the shares rather than the cash. For Zuck the end result is pretty much the same.
Average working
That's great but... (Score:2)
...I don't think the death of privacy and commercialization of human relationships was worth it.
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28 > 1.
And that was 2011.
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Re:OK Bill, Your Move (Score:5, Funny)
Basically, the problem is that he's Bill Gates, and that's a bad thing. Every dollar M$ 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.
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I'm willing to bet they vastly dwarf most people even if you adjust it for their net worth or earnings or what have you. He's done some incredible charitable work. He got a tax benefit just like everyone else who donates.
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There was a great op-ed piece in the paper the other day about how self-serving these tax-deductible "charitable" donations end up being.
A lot of them end up being donations to private schools that principally benefit their own children (easing "legacy" admissions to private colleges) or the other children of other plutocrats.
There's even criticism of donations to arts groups. While on the surface, I like the idea of keeping the performing arts groups going, it doesn't really benefit anyone who isn't buyin
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They don't really improve social welfare for poor people.
There's no net benefit to that.
Making donations to medical universities, libraries, symphonies, etc., is not only providing cultural benefit, but it is giving to people who are working for it.
Housing and medical care for the poor? What's the use? No amount of charity ever done on Earth has left us with any fewer poor people.
No, this is not a nice view. I'm just pointing out the pragmatic side.
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So you're saying you have 100% of your liquid income invested in shorting Facebook stock, right?
I mean, it's a sure thing....