Zuckerberg, wife to donate 99% of Facebook’s shares

The social media mogul and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan, made the announcement in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan welcomed their daughter, Maxima, to our world yesterday.

Facebook CEO March Zuckerberg is now a dad of a little baby Max.

The post attracted over 5,70,000 “likes”, including from Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

“We believe all lives have equal value, and that includes the many more people who will live in future generations than live today”, Zuckerberg and Chan said in their letter to Max.

Initially this will focus on areas such as personalised learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.

The announcement stunned the charity world. It will go to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the main focus of it will be to pursue its mission by funding non-profit organizations, participating in policy debates and making private investments. U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett was 76 when he committed to give away all his fortune.

The new initiative will be organized as a limited liability company, however, rather than as a nonprofit foundation. “If we can help children get a better education now then they can grow up and help others too in the time we might have otherwise waited to get started”. “So in that way this is not a foundation nor is it entirely charitable”.

The Initiative’s largest donation to date was the $1bn (£665 million) it gave to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2013. “Partnering with experts is more effective for the mission than trying to lead efforts ourselves”.

It’s a continuation of what we’ve seen developing over the past six months, where Zuckerberg appears at ease hosting heads of state as he does in the company of his own development team.

The Initiative hopes to solve some of the greatest challenges facing future generations that “cannot be solved by short term thinking”. The move comes after the couple became parents following the birth of their daughter, Max.

Zuckerberg will be giving away this fortune during his lifetime to “join many others in improving this world for the next generation”.