It sounds like he's looking to have his cake and eat it, selling his shares while retaining control.
1) He keeps all his stock, retains control, can't spend the money and can't donate it. The money serves to "keep the score" but his goal is to keep control of Facebook. His interest is still to run Facebook according to his ideas of how it should be run. He is not particularly aligned with stockholders who just wish to make money from FB, because, as we have established, he doesn't care about his FB stock's being worth any more in cash directly (unless there is a risk of it collapsing by 99%, but that is an extreme scenario). He cares only in so much as it allows him to exert more power through Facebook in the direction of whichever "historical legacy" goals he has.
2) He gradually sells FB stock as is, slowly cedes control of his company to other investors. Donates the 35.7 billion over time.
3) The company accepts this split. Zuckerberg still keeps control of the company and still runs it according to his wishes without caring directly about personal financial gain, just as in case 1. He is now able to donate (or use) the money as in 2, but faster.
So, if you accept that he is sincere in that he doesn't want to accumulate more money in his person but use it for charitable giving (and again, there is no reason to believe he wants get richer, there is little you can buy for yourself with 35.7 billion that 357 million won't get you), then the best alternative for everyone is #3. Facebook will be run just the same as if he couldn't sell his shares, yet the money will be used for charity.
p.s. Whether charity at scale should or should not be tax deductible is another matter, and there are arguments either way, but that is sort of independent of the analysis above.
Related: has there been any academic investigation to how investors value votes?
Apparently they don't value them very highly. Goog and Googl are only about 2% apart.
Or just in a so called blue chip. What meaning does 1000 voting shares of Ford really have?
Then why don't we ask the same in a democracy?
The number of shares is the wrong number to reason about, it's the percentage of control that is interesting. If an individual has 51% (or more) control, the comparison to a democracy is obviously nonsense.
(I used 1000 shares because it feels like a big number of shares but is still an utterly insignificant portion of Ford, which has a bit less than 4 billion shares)
In democracy, you can spend money on a PR campaign to sway many millions of votes your way.
And as another commenter noted, once a candidate is in place, lobbyists can pay to get proper legislation passed.
Finally, voting is rigged in any place where voting computers are installed, which appears to be a lot of places. Again, for the right money, you can completely change the course of an election.
A shot at some day finding a bigger fool than you to buy your shares for more than you paid.
Ftfy
I'm looking. Any solid proof of said illegal procedure, or just some more conspiracy theory from Alex Jones website?
Pick a different example if you'd like; plenty of "foundations" exist only to let some oligarch's kids play philanthropist.
Letting people play philanthropist is kind of the point of a philanthropic foundation.
[1] better in the sense that more money goes to the charity and less to the government, and better in the sense than the charity can hold the shares and sell at an advantageous time.
Edit: I just remembered, I think that Bill Gates is doing it in the opposite way, by liquidating and donating cash, so there may be some legitimate cases when donating cash instead of stock is preferable.
It goes way back over the years to the Rockefeller family and others.
Not only is it a tax shelter, they can control what the charity or whatever does. It is a good way to avoid paying a capital gains tax by donating shares to their own charity or organization.
A pity the taxes on the shares could have been collected by the federal government and used to pay off our national debt or create some good paying jobs.
People who aren't billionaires have to pay a capital gains tax if they sell shares that have a value more than the original investment.
I know a few critics of Mark Zuckerberg who would be very happy if all he did was sit on his money. They fear what he will do, not if.
Every founder of a billion-dollar company wants to have an impact on the world. The question is whether the impact he wants to have is something that needs (or deserves) preferential tax treatment, as well as the massive public praise he received for this act of 'philanthropy'.
It is true that the wealthy commonly use foundations that they control in order to advance initiatives that also financially benefit themselves or for-profit companies they own. In itself, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's almost definitionally true that Zuckerberg is using the foundation structure for the tax benefits.
Which is itself really a question about whether the government should be able to spend that money how it likes, or whether the zuckster should be able to spend it how he likes. Has the American government really earned your trust in its competence in managing money?
I really don't even feel like reading these posts on this site anymore since they are filled with passive aggressive jealousy at people having a massively larger real world impact than anyone else commenting here.
If this story had the words Facebook and Zuck replaced with Tesla and Elon there would be a much different tone.
Except he hasn't, yet. He's allocated billions to a corporation he owns, with the goal of, someday, spending those billions towards purposes that may or may not ultimately serve Facebook's very long term interests.
Directly from the post:
> Right now, there are amazing scientists, educators and doctors around the world doing incredible work. We want to help them make a bigger difference today, not 30 or 40 years down the road.
Unless Facebook is trying to become the next Theranos complaining about a guy who is placing billions on the table for upcoming medical related treatments in no way related to Facebook sounds like whining more because you don't like the person doing it vs. the act itself.
I'll take that over unadulterated fawning over tech celebrities.
Are you seriously comparing MZ pledging to spend millions on fighting disease and poverty around the world to the (actual) rape, murder and conquest of thousands of people?
I'm seriously suggesting that wanting to have an impact on the world doesn't imply anything positive.
Reminds me of https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/mark-zuckerb...
Another example is there were threads for GOOG and AAPL missing their Q1 targets but I don't see one for FB for crushing their earnings. Or may be there is one but it's not upvoted that well which just proves the point even more.
This is one of the things which is driving me away from HN. But I would be missing out on lot of technical and industry knowledge if I stop reading HN.