Mark And Priscilla Plan To Cure All The World’s Diseases Through The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of the social media platform Facebook. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with more than one billion users as of 2012, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.
Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named “Zucknet.” His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house.
In 2007, at 23, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. As of July 14th, 2020, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at $88.2 billion and he is listed by Forbes as the 4th richest person in the world.
In 2012, Zuckerberg got married to his long time girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. The two met and started dating while schooling in Harvard. Priscilla graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts (AB) in Biology. Mark dropped out. In 2008, Priscilla entered medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, she graduated in 2012 and finished her paediatrics residency in the summer of 2015.
The couple announced the creation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative on December 1, 2015, after the birth of their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg. CZI bills itself as “advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity.” The foundation donated $214 million worth of Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in November 2018.
CZI is very well funded. As the day-to-day leader, Chan oversees an annual budget of $700 million to 800 million, pressing a transformation agenda as audacious as anything her husband’s creation, Facebook, has achieved. Among CZI’s goals: to help prevent, cure or manage all disease over the next century.
CZI also wants to remake public education, pursue far-reaching immigration and criminal justice reform, and support affordable housing—all orchestrated by a newfangled organization that mixes philanthropic grant-making, venture investing, and the creation of new tech products in a way that’s never been done before. The Initiative already disbursed $1.4 billion in grants and made $100 million in venture investments.
CZI committed $25 million to the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator — a global effort to help speed the development of treatments for COVID-19. In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard, CZI’s investment will support efforts to identify and assess potentially promising therapies for COVID-19, expedite their development, and scale up their production to benefit millions of patients worldwide.
CZI committed $13.6 million to stand up a large-scale research collaboration between UC San Francisco, Stanford University, and the CZ Biohub that aims to better understand the spread of COVID-19 across the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are being celebrated by Neusroom for their efforts in helping the world combat the coronavirus. Check out the full list of honourees here.
