Zuckerburg's pledge aside, if he were to do nothing with his new LLC, he would face no tax penalties and would essentially be moving money from one place to the other with nobody benefiting in any tangible way.
The reason people are upset is because the last 30 years have amounted in an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich. All that wealth - everybody's wealth - was created by the labor of people long dead, all the way down to the first humans to develop agriculture. A staple of any society has been the need to tax wealth creation so public goods can be provided, from national security to a functioning court system.
By dodging taxes (which is what happens when you make a "charity" that isn't structurally obliged to make donations) you are circumventing the social contract and depriving the public of a portion of the profits derived from being a part of that society.
Creating Facebook or any other large company with a big workforce is no excuse to not pay taxes. Those people use roads, water, courts, and require protection from the police and military. That causes additional strain on the system and has to be paid for somehow.
I don't care how he spends his money, but establishing an LLC as a charity is a poor form of philanthropy.
All of the complaints really are just proxy reasons to complain about Facebook and the guy who founded it. If Warren Buffett did this exact thing last month none of these articles would have been written.
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.
As long as you're making this sort of argument, why stop at agriculture? Or humans, for that matter?
That's exactly the point. Why does Zuck make huge claims when not a single cent has changed hands yet. Fuck this PR campaign.
Just to make it clear: I wouldn't mind if he kept the money for himself and invested it for profit as any good capitalist would. But if you open your mouth to make a claim then you need to follow trough in a credible way.
And his previous "public works" attempt was a lobbying group for "immigration reform" that claimed to try to make life better for vast swaths of people and yet was simply a front to lobby the government to let tech businesses exploit immigrant slave labor more effectively. Accompanied by a similar impassioned speech about doing good works. Most of the lobbying was in the form of pretty despicable character assassination.
In particular he takes jabs at the Gates foundation for not lobbying for example. The Gates foundation is enormously successful and Zuckerberg hasn't accomplished anything. Right now all he's done is set up a company that he has control over and promised "guys, I'll give this money to 'charity' however I define it at my discretion whatever that means".
I'm hopeful and at its face I think it's a wonderful thing he's pledged to do but I think it's a bit premature to fall all over ourselves thanking him for reorganizing his finances because that's all he's really done so far.
I mean, come on. Is everyone supposed to reverently worship their betters? Do we thank our $deities (in respectful silence) that we have such nice overlords who promise to someday pursue a structured financial transaction in a tax-preferred manner, along with a promise that it will promote "human advancement", whatever the hell that is?
Sounds to me like whatever you have in mind as the opposite of "western culture" is a bit insulting to those cultures.
I'm irate because he didn't donate anything at all and yet still makes a big announcement.
Let's talk again once a significant(more than 30% of the pledged) amount of money has actually changed hands.
This whole thing is just celebrity gossip. It's exactly like those glossy magazines you see at the supermarket checkout line, except instead of movie stars it's tech stars.