Mark Zuckerberg family’s gift to the world

The couple’s Facebook holdings are valued at $45 billion – about $4 billion more than the reported assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and approximately six times the combined endowments of southeast Michigan’s 25 largest charitable foundations. The pledge also situates Zuckerberg and Chan in a centurylong tradition of American philanthropists that stretches back to industrialists Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, whose foundations still rank among the biggest in the country.

Mark took to Facebook, naturally, on Tuesday (Dec. 1) to announce the joyous news of his daughter’s arrival.

“As you begin the next generation of the Chan Zuckerberg family, we also begin the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation”, they posted in a 2,200-word letter to their new-born daughter on Facebook.

The announcement stunned the charity world. He’s starting early – most billionaires, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett, wait until their later years to start giving away their fortune.

The new initiative will be organized as a limited liability company, however, rather than as a nonprofit foundation.

“Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today”, he wrote in the letter. “So in that way this is not a foundation nor is it entirely charitable”.

In addition to the unusual structure of their initiative, Zuckerberg and Chan are distinguished by their youth, a rarity in high-end philanthropy, which they think will give them advantages in what they called the “very long time horizons” of their project. The couple will be in charge of the initiative, although Zuckerberg won’t be quitting his day job.

Last month Mark shared this cute photo of the couple’s dog on Facebook, saying, “Here’s a photo of Beast with our baby seat”.

The Facebook co-founder is one of the world’s wealthiest men. He and Chan, a 30-year-old pediatrician, have previously donated $100 million to public schools in Newark, New Jersey, and pledged $120 million to schools in poor communities of the San Francisco Bay Area.

A Zuckerberg family portraitndated photo provided by Mark Zuckerberg, Max Chan Zuckerberg is held by her parents, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg.

Shares of Facebook Inc were higher during the trading session. The filing further states that Zuckerberg plans to “sell or gift no more than $1 billion of Facebook stock” every year for the next three years, while maintaining his majority voting position at Facebook “for the foreseeable future”.

At 31, Mark Zuckerberg harbors dreams that dwarf even the ubiquitous social network he conjured as a restless undergraduate at Harvard.