How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
nytimes.com
How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#2Quote 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)
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#3Quote 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…
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.
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#4Quote 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…
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…
How is the money invested exactly, do you know?
Is he actually funding those companies in some way, or does he just own some stocks as part of some very diversified portfolio?
If it's the former, I really want to know. If it's the latter, stating that the Gates is financially supporting the destruction of agriculture is a very very strong claim. You need to argue that buying a company's stock on an open market does something significant besides increase the price of that stock by some small amount, or that the increase is meaningful. I have a hard time imagining what practical impact it would have on Monsanto's short term or long term operations that would justify using words such as "hypocrite".
There are investment funds that try to avoid "dirty" stocks, and it maybe it would be morally better to invest only in those funds. Until then, is everyone who invests in an index fund "dirty"? Monsanto is part of the S&P 500 after all.
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#5This 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.
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#6This 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…
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.
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#7>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 (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.
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#8>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 (warning, long read) Are we really going to begr…
> 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.
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#9Quote 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…
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…
> 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?
Re: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
#10This 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…
> The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable.
And Gates? The fact that he's now old and smiling clouds your judgement. Zuckerberg might be old benevolent founding father in 30 years too.