Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Give Away Fortune

From his Playboy interview, aged 29:

Playboy: What does the money actually mean to you?

Jobs: I still don't understand it. It's a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime--and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don't want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values.

Playboy: So what do you do?

Jobs: That's a part of my life that I like to keep private. When I have some time, I'm going to start a public foundation. I do some things privately now.

Playboy: You could spend all of your time disbursing your money.

Jobs: Oh, you have to. I'm convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar.

Playboy: Could that be an excuse to put off doing something?

Jobs: No. There are some simple reasons for that. One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy--there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can't succeed or fail, it's really hard to get better. Also, most of the time, the people who come to you with ideas don't provide the best ideas. You go seek the best ideas out, and that takes a lot of time.

Playboy: If you plan to use your visibility to create a model for people, why is this one of the areas you choose not to discuss?

Jobs: Because I haven't done anything much yet. In that area, actions should speak the loudest.

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920287

I find it odd how people such as Gates and Zuckerberg obsessively stomp down their competition through any means possible, and then turn around and grandiosely pledge to give away their gains.

This is a strange question to me. I know there is probably some similarity in how governments and individuals allocate large amounts of money--for instance, federal spending to curtail HIV/AIDS in Africa compared to Gates' spending to curtail malaria--but the bulk of it doesn't overlap. Gates, Buffett, and Zuckerberg shouldn't hire my town's police force, and can't afford to hire my country's military or even maintain my country's highways.

As long as things like that need to be done, someone needs to pay taxes. And Warren Buffett would be the first to tell you he and his fellow billionaires should be the one paying the taxes.

Poverty, hunger, and sickness will all continue to be a problem this side of singularity, practically by definition.

No amount of money thrown directly at the problem will ever put a halt to them, our only hope for salvation lies in continuing our pursuit of technology unhindered.

Without the concept of hightech startups, most of the people we are discussing would never have their fortunes to give away.