Facebook CEO and world’s youngest self-made billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to give most of his fortune away to charity.
The 26-year-old, who co-founded the social networking site while still a student at Harvard University, has signed up to a project founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet which encourages the super-rich to publicly pledge money to charity.
Called ‘The Giving Pledge’ it encourages the rich to shun anonymous donations, quoting research which found the public are more likely to donate when they see others donating.
Zuckerberg, who is the youngest person to sign up, said in a statement: “People wait until late in their career to give back. But why wait when there is so much to be done?
“With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts.”
Earlier this year he donated $100 million in shares to schools in New Jersey.
Others to sign up to The Giving Pledge include film maker George Lucas and Ted Turner, the founder of CNN.
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What wealth – it’s all based on the percieved value of FB and locked in shares of it. You can’t simply sell all those shares, and unless he finds a way of actually making revenue from FB users, those shares could be worth very much less very soon anyway. So, although wealthy by comparision to many, he is not actually a billionaire at all.
stop being a hater and let the kid shine… Damn atleast he’s giving most of it away…
You don’t know what you’re talking about. In addition to shares, which produce real money when sold, there’s other huge streams of revenue for Facebook such as advertising.