Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford $F, Gates, and, now, Zuckerberg.
Facebook $META co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday (Dec. 1) that he and his wife plan to donate almost all their shares in the social-media giant—a stockpile currently valued at roughly $45 billion—to charitable causes, immediately elevating the 31-year-old into orbit among the most prominent industrialist-turned-philanthropists in the world.
The announcement, which came as part of a letter to his just born daughter Max, provides a fitting ending to a year that saw Facebook’s shares soar 37%, trouncing the gain of the S&P 500 stock index, which rose just 2%.
Since the beginning of the year, Facebook’s market value has risen from roughly $220 billion to $300 billion. And over the past two years, Facebook has at times leapfrogged the market cap of some of the largest companies in corporate America, including JPMorgan $JPM Chase, General Electric $GE, IBM $IBM, and Bank of America $BAC.
It is now the seventh-largest company in the S&P 500, by market value, according to data provider FactSet.
The reason? This year Facebook came into its own as a corporate entity, delivering on better-than-expected profits, rising revenues, and increasing numbers of active users (there are now some 1 billion daily active users on the site).
Facebook has also continued to show significant progress in solving what was once its most-pressing business quandary: Making money on mobile activity.
Zuckerberg has engaged in charitable giving for years, but nothing remotely on this scale. And his transformation into a full-blown philanthropist won’t take place overnight. As explained in an SEC filing, the plan to donate his fortune will commence with the sale or gift of no more than $1 billion over each of the next three years.
But his turn toward charity does continue his string of precociousness. (Microsoft $MSFT founder Bill Gates was in his early 40s when he ramped up his charitable giving in the late 1990s.) With an endowment of more than $41 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest in the US.
