Mark Zuckerberg responds to critics of his $45B pledge

But I don't like dynasties. I don't like that trusts and foundations are being used as a way to bring back dynastic wealth and power.

You see this at play in the most powerful families in America: the Kennedies, Clintons, Bushes, Romneys, Pelosis. They all use trusts and foundations to preserve wealth between generations.

I understand why people are skeptical.

Concentration of power is an emergent property of network effects. As long as "being popular" is positively correlated with your decision to use a product, then the products that are already popular will get more popular, and their owners will get rich. It's largely (but not entirely) random who the owners are, but their existence is guaranteed.

If everybody thought for themselves and made their decisions independently of what everyone else does, you'd see a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth. But unfortunately most people lack the courage (or maybe just time & energy) to make up their own minds, and outsource their opinions to others. Ironically, many of the very rich are the biggest critics of this phenomena - indeed, the reason they got rich was because they had the ability to think for themselves and see what other people didn't see.

The same applies to political power (people would rather vote for a Clinton or Bush than an unknown candidate just because they have the brand name recognition) and to fame (Paris Hilton got to be famous because people talk about her. Why do they talk about her? Because their friends talk about her.)

If seriously corrupting effects can occur from one person's use of money, we have a larger issue and need to address the cause (someone can use money to cause a big, society-wide problem), not the symptom (someone has a lot of money and is using it in a socially-disastrous way). If we're nitpicking at individual's monetary use, the system is broken.

Individuals should be able to amass any amount of money and not cause large-scale social damage. Looking at a set of fortunes above a certain size and confiscating them because we can't build a resilient system is totally bad. In effect, we're already doing it with income tax.

If you don't contend that Zuck will cause large-scale social damage, what's wrong with him having that much money and using it as he sees fit? After all, he "earned" it.

You have a choice to not use Facebook, and if everyone refuses to use Facebook, he will lose his wealth and his influence. When was the last time you heard about Tom from MySpace on TV? He and his team have done a great job promoting the product, despite issues like privacy.

If you are looking from an ideal socialism, then I am sad to inform you that socialism does not work at all because most human I know have opinions, and when there's opinion people take side, and when people take side people turn into control. When people have professional skill, they become experts, and when they are experts, they are assigned roles. You wouldn't listen to me for medical advice. Between a nobody physicist and a Nobel laureate in Physics, the Nobel laureate's opinions obviously carry more weight in a conference talk.

And btw, he doesn't have $45B in his bank account. Most of his money are still virtual, in bytes (argue about silver vs greenback, in the 1800s).

Of course there is danger in accumulating power. For a nation, being the most powerful doesn't mean you have to stick your head in everyone's else affairs. There is always some gains and some losses when a giant arises. Giants with the right vision can create quality products (i.e. Apple), but giants dictating vision (i.e. Microsoft) can cause life fortune to turn around (although Microsoft is doing much better in the last few years).

You can be the forerunner in your competition, but if you want to maintain your influence, you must allow some competitions. Only way to innovate is to accept challenges. You don't write better code unless someone critique you. That's the difference between a thinker and a narrator.

To be fair, it's his money. It's not that he bought a lottery ticket and won the jackpot. He build a company and made loads of money. It's up to him what to do with it, I guess.

In (1), it clearly hasn't worked then given all of the comments around here. Is it not highly likely that he would have considered this backlash that he received? If I was in his position and wanted to achieve (1), I would make a high profile donation of ~$1 billion (~2% of his worth) to a respectable charity.

The global distribution of anti-malarial bed nets would never have as great an impact on health and poverty as something like the invention of the electric light bulb. Sometimes what is best for increasing quality of life around the world isn't the redistribution of wealth and cannot be achieved in a charitable structure. In scenario (2), it is completely reasonable to set up an LLC for this purpose. Instead of thinking 'what's the worst he can do?' think 'what's the best he can do?'

Second, if you had read his latest comment or understood how a LLC functions and taxes apply, you would know that the LLC will have to pay taxes on the sale of those assets.

Third, any profit the LLC makes from investments in for-profit organizations will also be taxed.

In a previous comment I made on charities and trusts, he would be more likely to be avoiding taxes if he did create a charitable remainder trust for his kid. There's an immediate tax benefit, you get to use the yearly distribution any way you see fit, and there's no guarantee the money will ever see a charitable cause.

For the longer version of this comment, see PG's essay titled Wealth.

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

As long as you're making this sort of argument, why stop at agriculture? Or humans, for that matter?

$10 in SF for a billionaire is really pretty modest. Compare to e.g. Larry Ellison: http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2011/05/31/pacific_heights_lar...

Having known him at the time, I will assert that this is not some random cherry-picked chat fragment of him being a dick. It just happens to be one of the few times he explained his thought process in the open.

I think it highly unlikely that he changed this much while no one else I knew at that age did. Among dozens of people of the same background, university, age, cohort, and activity, none have had such a remarkable transition from devil into saint. Their personalities are intact. And his?

Surely there is another angle of counter. I don't believe in winning argumentation by any means, especially by scientific disinformation without empirical cause.

I'm not saying he still feels this way or didn't or couldn't change his thinking and attitude. Common decency would behoove him to and it's reasonable to grant that. I'm happy for him and his new family, but away from all that and his foundation (which sounds very positive), It's hard not to view a lot of what Facebook does with its users through the kind of cavalier attitude embodied in that old chat log. In fact, it helps makes a lot more sense of some of their moves if you do.

What life lessons would one learn from that? I've always tried to imagine how Mark himself really feels about it, because even if he's embarrassed, it's not untrue. Today, over 1/7th of the world does just "trust him" and its made him a billionaire. He was no dummy back then.

EDIT: Kudos to him (and Gates before him) for trying to give back now.

Like advocating for increased H1-B visas over simply awarding more visas directly to individuals, as one "policy debate" Zuckerberg has recently supported. Or whatever strikes his fancy at the time.