Facebook’s stock has not only recovered from the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal earlier this year, but took a turn and spiked 2.4% in revenue growth, hitting an all-time high last Friday, 6 July 2018. And in the process, it has propelled its co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg into the world’s top 3 list of billionaires. He is now the world’s third richest man trailing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Mark Zuckerberg claimed his standing as the top 3 richest man with US$81.6 billion net worth, beating investment genius Warren Buffet by a whopping US$373 million within the past year. The Facebook CEO’s rise to this lofty position also turned the top 3 spots on the Bloomberg index into a group of tech founders for the first time ever.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Surpassed Buffett As Top 3 Richest Man in the World
While the wealth of Zuckerberg comes in many forms such as cash and real estate assets, nearly 97% of his wealth still resides in his Facebook stocks. That said, Zuckerberg’s ascension to this position has engendered some controversy, particularly pertaining to his lack of charitable giving which allowed him to surpass Buffett. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Buffet has donated almost 71% of his wealth (US$46 billion) to worthy charities since year 2000. Whereas Bill Gates, incidentally, is the world’s second most charitable billionaire, having donated 22% of his wealth since 2000.
However, Zuckerberg’s big future philanthropic plans may potentially overtake Buffett’s charity, as both he and wife, Priscilla Chan, have devoted approximately $10 billion so far to to philanthropy, and has pledged to eventually give away 99% of their Facebook shares in their lifetime.
In his defence, none of this points to Zuckerberg being a slouch in terms of charitable goodwill, he had previously given some of the fortune to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, (CZI), a limited liability company used by the couple to use their money either for charitable donations or to fund for-profit organizations and startups that fulfil a charitable goal such as the funding series for Africa’s software system in 2016.
Meanwhile, tech giants ahead of Zuckerberg on the Bloomberg index – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates – have also seen a rise in their fortunes of US$42.7 billion and US$2.4 billion respectively. Gates who has already donated over US$50 billion to charity but also pledges to give away large portions of his wealth in years to come.
The world’s richest man, Bezos however, appears to have intentions to hold on to his assets, or so it seems with the miserly amount of less than $100 million of his $141.9 billion fortune donated to charity in total.
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