
How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself - SpaceInvader
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html
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rogeryu
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.

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.

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)

~~~
sametmax
Exactly. This is what kills me with the recent trend of claming billionairs
are heroes.

This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But
most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into
companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing
direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect.

E.G: I lived and worked in Africa. I saw the results of the "green revolution"
made by Monsanto, an destructive agriculture program financially supported by
the Gates. It's ugly. The continent is still recovering from it (and
apparently they are in better shape than some parts of India).

But the Gate foundation says they want to help Africa : they fight malaria. So
on one hand african people can starve, have no control over their agriculture
or natural ressources, but they _may_ be saved from malaria in 10 years. This
is hypocrisy at its best.

They are not heroes. They are smart investors. And for one thing they build
for others, they build 3 for themself and may destroy many things on their
path. Do not get blinded by their (good) PR.

~~~
Oletros
> This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But
> most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes
> into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc.
> causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect.

Any source for that?

~~~
vanattab
Here is a link to the foundations financial records. I did not see anything
that I would object to but maybe the GP will look over the actual data and
enlighten us.

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-
Informatio...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-
Information/Financials)

------
x1798DE
I have to say, I don't care what Zuckerberg spends his money on, it'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'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't know if anyone would bother asking if he
might have some ulterior motive.

Then again, I don't go in for hero worship, do I have any need to identify who
is doing something heroic and who isn't.

~~~
kcanini
I think you missed the point: Zuckerberg is doing this to avoid paying taxes
on his billions of dollars of accumulated wealth. Part of that money should be
going back to the society that helped him earn it. Instead, he will have
complete control over how it is spent.

~~~
x1798DE
He is under no obligation to pay taxes he does not owe. Tax deductability of
charitable giving is effectively government spending, so take it up with your
lawmakers if you don't want that. It has no bearing on Zuckerberg from a legal
perspective, and since I'm not out to judge him, I don't really care if he
decides to spend his money on a foundation or give it to the government.

------
aton
This might be a downvote target, but I think it's worth it. So here I go.

I'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:

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.

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'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.

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'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?

4\. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big
lotteries in another, and I'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.

~~~
puredemo
That's the beauty of capitalism -- the market decides value, not some random
bystander.

Who really cares whether you would group Zuckerberg with Buffett and Gates or
not? I don't understand why that is relevant to the article.

------
puredemo
>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..

Hopefully Zuckerberg learned a valuable lesson there -- improving inner city
schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them.

Case-in-point:
[http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html](http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html)
(warning, long read)

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's hardly bad behavior as the article seems to imply.

~~~
brador
> improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is
> thrown at them.

Because of the prevailing infrastructure. If instead he had created a
customized boarding school for the inner city kids somewhere safe and pleasant
we'd be seeing real meaingingful change in their outlook right now.

As it is, they were in the same unhealthy environment they've always been in.
It's not the schools, it's the teachers, the streets, their peers, the home
life, everything.

A boarding school is the best solution to fix all that.

~~~
DrillBitterMan
Research shows that school racial integration alone increases outcomes for all
children by high double digits. In fact, racial integration is to my knowledge
the only reliable method anyone has bothered to attempt to improve educational
outcomes in underachieving schools.

What are referred to as "inner city schools" can more relevantly be referred
to as re-segregated schools or just never-integrated schools.

ProPublica came out with extremely compelling data on this subject just
several weeks ago.

~~~
puredemo
Is this the article you're referring to?

[http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-5-florida-
schools...](http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-5-florida-schools-
ended-integration-and-became-among-worst-in-state/)

It's a bit thin on data / statistics..

