Mark Zuckerberg beat Warren Buffett to become the third richest person in the world – for a very good reason



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Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to celebrate. He survived the Congressional Review and faced a series of privacy scandals on Facebook. His latest move, aimed at restricting other companies' access to Facebook's API data, has wreaked havoc on many entrepreneurs. But that seems to have worked, at least as far as investors are concerned. The company's stock closed at a record high of $ 203.23 on Friday. That's enough for Zuckerberg to make Warren Buffett the third richest person in the world after Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Zuckerberg's net worth is now $ 81.6 billion, according to Bloomberg, while Buffett's is $ 81.2 billion. Gates is worth about $ 92 billion, and Bezos is worth $ 140 billion.

But there is another, more important reason, that Zuckerberg is now worth more: Buffett did a great job of giving his money, something that he, Zuckerberg, Gates and most of the world's best-known billionaires are doing. are committed to doing. Buffett gave the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone a Berkshire Hathaway stock worth more than $ 50 billion.

When it comes to giving, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have a lot of catching up to do. They seem to have spent much less than $ 10 billion on philanthropy. Part of this went to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, (CZI) which is not a foundation or even a nonprofit, even though it has a non-profit branch. Instead, it's a limited liability company. The purpose of this structure seems to be to allow Chan and Zuckerberg to use their money either for charitable donations, or to fund for-profit organizations and startups that serve a charitable purpose. For example, he led the financing of the B series for Andela, a startup that trains software developers in Africa. There is no doubt that providing coding education to people in the poorest regions of the world will make the world a better place. But if Andela proves a huge success, CZI could end up reaping big profits.

Presumably, Chan and Zuckerberg will make many more donations in the future. Three years ago, they promised to give 99% of their net worth in their lifetime and pledged this money to CZI. At the current price of Facebook shares, they have at least $ 70 billion to take away. On the other hand, Zuckerberg is over 50 years younger than Buffett, so they probably have a lot more time to donate.

Bill and Melinda Gates, for their part, donated more than $ 45 billion to the foundation that bears their names. (Warren Buffett is also a big donor.) But what about Bezos? The founder of the Amazon has shown very little interest in philanthropy until last year, when he became the richest man in the world. At the time, the New York Times asked him to say in black when he had plans to give, and he tweeted the question of where he was to give. He has received thousands of answers. Despite this, his donations so far appear to total less than $ 100 million, and the most important – a collegiate fund for the "Dreamers", illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children – seems as much a statement policy that a grant.

In the competition to be the richest person in the world, Bezos is ahead of the pack, with about $ 50 billion more than Gates, his closest competitor. But in the competition to be the biggest donor in the world, he finds himself in the dust.

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