Don’t Give Facebook’s Zuckerberg a Hard Time

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are placing 99 percent of their stock—valued at 45 billion dollars—into an investment vehicle for charity.

Put that way, it sounds slightly less generous than donating 45 billion dollars in cash, but in all likelihood the total over time will amount to much more.

Good for him. And good for his favorite charities.

Nobody needs 450 billion dollars. Zuckerberg could stash that much cash in an underground vault in his yard, where it wouldn’t even earn any interest, and he’d still have a cool half-million dollars a year to spend for a thousand years.

He won’t exactly be uncomfortable now that he’s knocked himself down to a “mere” 450 million. Even the Queen of England could get by on that much.

The response to Zuckerberg’s epic giveaway is mostly positive, of course, but there’s an undercurrent of skepticism out there, as well.

The Atlantic dismisses the whole thing as non-charity charity.

The New York Times is being downright churlish when it says, “[Zuckerberg’s] P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock” and suggests he’s doing this for the tax break. “He amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it.”

Similar sentiments are all over Twitter right now.

Nobody spends that much money on public relations, partly because hardly anyone has that much to spend, but also because, even if they did, there is no chance that any amount of good press can yield more than 45 billion dollars in additional profits that wouldn’t have materialized otherwise.

And nobody gives 99 percent of their wealth away to avoid paying a much smaller percentage in taxes. The math doesn’t add up. It’s not even close.

The skepticism is perhaps understandable. Hardly any of us would donate 99 percent of our net worth to charity. Most of us can’t. We all need money to live, and we all want more than we need so we can live comfortably and stress-free.

There is a point, though, where enough is truly enough. Where money is just an abstraction. Where more money can’t possibly lead to any more happiness or contentment. Zuckerberg and his wife passed that point a long time ago.

Whether or not their initiative helps the world as much as they hope, they deserve praise, not a hard time. Hopefully they’ll inspire others in their income bracket to follow their lead.