How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself

Quote from the article: Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong. Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle.<p>In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.<p>An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That’s what America is all about. But as a society, we don’t generally call these types of activities “charity.” (End of quote)

I have to say, I don&#x27;t care what Zuckerberg spends his money on, it&#x27;s his money. I found it pretentious when he deigned to write an open letter to his daughter informing the world that he was going to go on a spending spree, but I&#x27;m also not too keen on everyone on both sides analyzing whether his motivations are pure. If he was going to buy a thousand jet planes and start a jet plane demolition derby I don&#x27;t know if anyone would bother asking if he might have some ulterior motive.<p>Then again, I don&#x27;t go in for hero worship, do I have any need to identify who is doing something heroic and who isn&#x27;t.

This might be a downvote target, but I think it&#x27;s worth it. So here I go.<p>I&#x27;m curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this:<p>1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates.<p>2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg&#x27;s path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery.<p>3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren&#x27;t search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google?<p>4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I&#x27;m asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.

&gt;Maybe Mr. Zuckerberg will make wonderful decisions, ones I would personally be happy with. Maybe not. He blew his $100 million donation to the Newark school system..<p>Hopefully Zuckerberg learned a valuable lesson there -- improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them.<p>Case-in-point: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;pas&#x2F;pa-298.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;pas&#x2F;pa-298.html</a> (warning, long read)<p>Are we really going to begrudge Zuckerberg for trusting Cory Booker, who was by all accounts very persuasive, and investing $100M+ in inner city schools? That&#x27;s hardly bad behavior as the article seems to imply.