Mark Zuckerberg giving away 99% of his shares to promote equality for all children.

[mpk1988]

Guy does something nice and some of the comments.. Ughh.. Sick low class uneducated jackasses with a gutter mentality.

 

[rubyjackass]

Childhood health ie first five years of life is not a recurring expense and it saves a lot of health care dollars in the future, not to mention sick days from work for the parents and for the child as he becomes adult. Should be combined with vaccinations, sanitation, maternal nutrition everything to keep babies and toddlers healthy and happy.

It is a recurring expense if people stay uneducated. But I agree that all children should get vaccination and nutrition. It costs very very less to provide this if the parents know that these are necessary. Vaccination barely takes Rs 100 and nutrition is also not costly if one knows what to eat.

Yet we are not able to achieve 100% coverage, again because of a lack of education among parents. That is why my main interest is in education. One generation of people with everyone studying till 10th class.

 

[C130]

Even If he had a very bad tax advisor, at most 40% would go to Uncle Sam. No country has 100% capital gains tax certainly not the capitalist US.



But Elon Musk already has that covered. I doubt if he would ever have trouble raising money.

What about kids who through no fault of their own were born to extreme disadvantage?

world charties have been giving money to the extreme disadvantage for decades!! what has changed??

it's their governments that keep holding them back

 

[Sky lord]

Guy does something nice and some of the comments.. Ughh.. Sick low class uneducated jackasses with a gutter mentality.

Don't hold back. Now tell us what you really feel.

The thing is people are so jaded and suspicious that nobody believes when somebody does something genuinely nice and that too an atheist and an ethnic Jew.

world charties have been giving money to the extreme disadvantage for decades!! what has changed??

it's their governments that keep holding them back

For the first time in history more than 2/3 rds of the people on the planet are living above poverty, maybe that is what has changed?

45 billion is not going to change the history of the world, it is nowhere near enough, governments and their agencies have to do their part too and their part will be bigger. But if it helps even one child or one million children climb out of grinding poverty should we then mock it?

Also, it sends out a message that money is not important in itself, it is only a means to an end. Historically never have rich people given away most of their money in their own lifetimes. They always tied up most if it in trust funds for their descendants and used discretionary spending on charitable work and this charitable work has made a difference. The new tech billionaires have started a new trend and I include Elon Musk among these.

 

[Jlaw]

Think about it. How can tax offset from giving away 99% of your stock result in a net gain in total wealth?

It's not a one time give away. No doubt there will be tax savings. He is giving away the shares of the company, I'm sure he has a few tens of billions for Max to inherit.

 

[Azadkashmir]

yh it will go towards George soros, david rockfeller , rothstine, Rothschild, charity group cos they care for poor.

 

[Faiez]

I am not saying it will make him rich, I am saying that 45 billion is not his money anyway it will go to uncle Sam as soon as its converted to cash.

~20% would go to taxes.

But the thing is that he's a major stake holder in facebook, he can't sell that much stock on the exchange overnight without causing share prices to take a big dip. He might be able to arrange a sale to some investment firm or fund or a whole bunch of them, but that takes time too. So he's not making a sale.

What he's doing (from what I've read), is simply giving all of the shares (no actual cash involved) to a non-profit company he setup.

In short there is no $45 billion anywhere. It's just ~400+ million shares of facebook inc.

More over, facebook does not pay dividends. Most likely, what he'll do is sell in small chunks or just exchange them for ownership in other companies or just give away stocks to charities which could later sell them etc etc...

In terms of taxes, if he all planned to do with his money was give away, he'll be doing that in a more cost effective way.

btw, the remainder (1% of the shares that he's not donated), still amounts to half a billion dollars, plus he's got according to well connected people a couple of billion dollars in cash and cash equivalents.......

 

[Nilgiri]

What he's doing (from what I've read), is simply giving all of the shares (no actual cash involved) to a non-profit company he setup.

Actually its been clarified it may not all be purely "non-profit"....though I'm guessing the profits will be reinvested back into these various development-based investment vehicles.

No, Mark Zuckerberg is not giving 99% of his Facebook shares to charity - Times of India

 

[KAL-EL]

Guy does something nice and some of the comments.. Ughh.. Sick low class uneducated jackasses with a gutter mentality.

Welcome to PDF

 

[EAsian]

Actually its been clarified it may not all be purely "non-profit"....though I'm guessing the profits will be reinvested back into these various development-based investment vehicles.

No, Mark Zuckerberg is not giving 99% of his Facebook shares to charity - Times of India

Yes，Zuckerberg just made a investment.A charity fund can also make money.He didn't give this money to anyone actually.Now He have to pay much less tax when he pass his money to his son/daughter.Unlike you，some indians are far too stupid to realize this，because doubt their western masters will be a sin.

 

[Holmes2]

Good job sir

 

[Faiez]

Yes，Zuckerberg just made a investment.A charity fund can also make money.He didn't give this money to anyone actually.Now He have to pay much less tax when he pass his money to his son/daughter.Unlike you，some indians are far too stupid to realize this，because doubt their western masters will be a sin.

and what is wrong with that ?

oh no the evil capitalist dude who keep what they earn.....

 

[as1mz]

Well, apparently not. Not technically.

Mark Zuckerberg is NOT Donating 99% of His Facebook Shares to Charity | Today in Pakistan

 

[Blue Marlin]

A girl called Max? I am thinking they are longing for a son but end up with a girl

So they stick with the name.

did you know he asked xi jinping for a name for his unborn daughter at the time and he refused
China’s President Xi Jinping ‘turns down Mark Zuckerberg’s request to name his unborn child’ at White House dinner | People | News | The Independent


also the people who are very rich and are donating all of their money are hypocrities.
read this from the washington post: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad - The Washington Post

or just read it below:
In 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they would commit 95 percent of their wealth to charitable work. Together with Warren Buffett, they also created the Giving Pledge, which asks the richest people in the world to devote half or more of their fortunes to philanthropy.

One of the earliest people to sign the pledge? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. So it was not a complete surprise when Zuckerberg and Chan announced on Tuesday their plan to set aside 99 percent of their Facebook shares — “about $45 billion” — for charity.

The news is this: Taking a page from the Gates family, they will use the money to pump up their nonprofit, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The private foundation is an especially American style of charitable giving. Nonprofit groups in the United States play a disproportionately large role in public life, in part because American tax laws make it attractive for the rich to donate. Much of their wealth could otherwise be captured by capital gains and estate taxes.

Private spending on social welfare in the United States is four times the average in advanced economies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The wealthiest countries, like France and Germany, are far more likely to use government resources to promote social good, and far less likely to use private resources.

This gap in national philosophies helps explain why the Giving Pledge has been popular with American billionaires, yet not quite as popular abroad. German shipping magnate Peter Krämer is one of the most vocal detractors of the pledge, and the American tradition of government-sponsored charity. Here's an excerpt from a 2010 interview with the German paper Der Spiegel, which asked him for his reaction to the plan.

Krämer: I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That's unacceptable.

SPIEGEL: But doesn't the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

Compared to the richest nations, the United States ranks near the bottom in terms of public spending on social support, according to the OECD. But that’s because a large chunk of the work is carried out by nonprofit organizations, or otherwise subsidized by the government through tax breaks.

On average in well-off countries, private social spending accounts for 2.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In the United States, private social spending is 11 percent.

Americans are some of the most charitable people in the world in part because there is a centuries-old tradition of private nonprofit groups helping people in lieu of the government.

Even Alexis de Tocqueville observed the trend in the 1830s, writing: “In every case, at the head of any new undertaking where in France you would find the government, or in England some great lord, in the United States you are sure to find an association."

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the American system of tax-subsidized charity, of course. As de Tocqueville argued, promoting charity has the benefit of improving social cohesion. He wrote that when the government taxes and gives to the poor, people feel slighted. When people voluntarily give to the poor, they feel better about themselves.

The critique is that this system affords too much power to the rich, whose decisions may not align with what’s best for society. This is not to say that the government is a paragon of efficacy either, but it risks a lot to depend on a handful of mega-billionaires to be prudent, effective philanthropists.

The U.S. tax code "ends up subsidizing the gifts of high-income taxpayers the most, lower-income renters the least, and middle-class homeowners in the middle,” Duke University's Charles T. Clotfelter has written. "One of the most significant consequences of this tax treatment of charitable giving is to give to the wealthiest taxpayers a disproportionate role in allocating public resources and influencing the direction that institutions will take."

In his book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," economist Thomas Piketty proposed a wealth tax as one way to address rising inequality — and transfer wealth from individuals to the state. In the United States, estate and gift taxes achieve some of that function by prodding people to donate their wealth instead of bequeathing it to their children. (Economists like Piketty tend to regard those measures as too modest.)

The debate is whether the money is better of in the hands of the government, or in service to private nonprofits. There's no denying the good intentions of the billionaire philanthropists, but it can be hard to know whether the decisions they make about how to use their money ultimately serve society in the best ways.

Gates has already given away more than $30 billion, and Buffet has parted with $22 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock. In 2010, before the lion's share of those gifts, the Guardian described the impact of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on public health:

Precise effects of big charity projects can be hard to measure, especially over a relatively short period. But already two bodies that the foundation funds heavily, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have, according to the foundation, delivered vaccines to more than 250 million children in poor countries and prevented more than an estimated five million deaths.

"The foundation has brought a new vigour," says Michael Edwards, a veteran charity commentator and usually a critic of billionaire philanthropists. "The charity sector can almost disempower itself; be too gloomy about things . . . Gates offers more of a positive story. He is a role model for other philanthropists, and he is the biggest."

What genre of philanthropy will Chan and Zuckerberg invest in? Possibly anything. Their letter Tuesday set two missions, both ambitiously vague: “advancing human potential” and “promoting equality." They mention curing diseases, improving clean energy, promoting entrepreneurship, fighting poverty and hunger, empowering women and minorities, and so on.

The pair do not have a sterling track record when it comes to effective charity. One of their previous efforts, a high-profile $100 million donation to fix the schools in Newark, N.J., has been widely criticized as a failure.

Chan and Zuckerberg write in their announcement that they have learned from their past experiences with philanthropy. For now, they will start with their own community in San Francisco, focusing on education, health and “connecting people.”

 

[EAsian]

Some Indians are sick.Since when accusing their western masters for evading tax and hypocrasy become a taboo in their minds？