On December 2, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife wrote a letter to their newly born daughter pledging 99% of their Facebook shares — currently valued at approx $45 billion — towards the newly established Chan Zuckerberg Initiative aimed at addressing the dual objectives advancing human potential and promoting equality. In this letter, the Zuckerberg couple note that in technology lies the solution to find evils across fields. Their focus, from a preliminary perusal of the letter, seems to be largely on the medical sciences to improve longevity and quality of life, and on personalized learning techniques where they confirm to work with education leaders across the globe. Prima facie, this seems like a wonderful initiative because it firstly acknowledges the role of tech in taking our race forward, and secondly pledges a large amount of capital to back this vision going ahead. How this pans out is for us to wait and watch. There have been other private organizations set up by business tycoons such as Bill and Melinda Gates, and Azim Premji and Shiv Nadar. However with the backing of Facebook’s founders, the scale and impact potential of this initiative is massive and hence the world waits to watch eagerly how this will pan out. There has been speculation amongst certain sections mooting a contra-view to this initiativeas well. Some observers have noted that the initiative is registered as an LLP and not a charitable trust, thus not compelling them to spend towards philanthropy and giving the maneuvering elbow room to divert funds to pure profit generating investments.
