Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today the birth of a baby girl with his wife Priscilla Chan–and in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today, pledged to give away 99% of his stock in the social network toward charitable causes in his lifetime.
That pledge is worth $45 billion at its current value, but Zuckerberg isn’t planning to give away more than $1 billion a year for the next three years so that he can maintain voting control of Facebook, the company announced in the securities filing. The couple will donate their shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC, which will make private investments that will support the foundation’s work. Per the filing:
“Mark will continue to control such shares as a result of his control over the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Over the course of their lives, these shares, or the net after-tax proceeds from the sale of such shares, will be used to advance the mission of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Priscilla and Mark will decide together how best to allocate funds.”
Zuckerberg owns about 4 million shares of Class A shares in Facebook and approximately 419 million supervoting shares.
In a separate, publicly published letter to his newly born daughter Maxima, Zuckerberg laid out his intention to focus his philanthropic efforts on “advancing human potential and promoting equality.”
The move shouldn’t come as a surprise–back in 2010, Zuckerberg signed the Giving Pledge, established by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, in which billionaires agree to donate the majority of their wealth to charity.
Zuckerberg donated $100 million worth of his Facebook shares to the Newark, New Jersey, public school system in September 2010. In December 2012, he gave $500 million worth of his Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. In 2014, Zuckerberg and Chan donated $120 million to improve schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and in October 2014, they gave $25 million to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola.