Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that he is not running for President. The billionaire will be over the age of 35 and therefore eligible to run by the time of the next American Presidential election in 2020.
Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed in a written response to the question, “No. I’m focused on building our community at Facebook and working on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.” The Initiative is the non-profit foundation established by the Facebook founder and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife have promised to give 99 percent of their wealth away to charity.
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A source said to be close to Mark Zuckerberg added, “There’s absolutely no truth to the idea that Mark is running for office and I’ve heard it directly from him.”
Speculation about a Mark Zuckerberg run for President came after the billionaire revealed plans to visit more than 30 States across the U.S. But apparently he is doing so to promote his philanthropic work and the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation.
If you think that it s too early to talk about the 2020 Presidential elections, think again. After every election cycle over the last 30 years the next campaign has been starting earlier and earlier. Candidates now declare a year before the first primary is even held and even two years before the general election. The mid-term elections, held at the halfway point of a Presidential term, usually mark the star of the next Presidential runs.
This is largely due to the need to fund raise. But billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg could spend the $200 million and more needed without batting an eye, so they do not need to run around begging people for checks.
And there is another issue now. Donald Trump had never held elective office before, nor did he even hold an appointed government job. This makes him the first person to become President of the United States not having had any government experience at all and without at least having been a general first like Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant.
And Trump won largely because he was already famous. So this opens the door for any and all other famous rich people like Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Kraft, Larry Silverstein, Michael Bloomberg and even Sheldon Adelson to run. Even movie stars like and directors like Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Howard Stern and J.J. Abrams could run. The only requirements now are what it actually says in the Constitution: the candidate must have been born an American citizen and be over 35 years of age.
In other Mark Zuckerberg news, his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has acquired the science search engine Meta.
The acquisition was revealed in a Facebook post on Monday by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative‘s president of science Cornelia Bargmann and the organization’s CTO Brian Pinkerton. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative says that it plans on improving Meta’s product. The Meta search engine reads all scientific research and uses an algorithm to provide it to clients based on relevance.
The initiative did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Meta AI previously raised $7.5 million from venture capitalists, as reported by Bloomberg. Zuckerberg and Chan have pledged to spend more than $3 billion over the next decade to work on curing diseases.
Bargmann and Pinkerton wrote on Facebook, “Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal. Our goal is to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.”
So maybe Mark Zuckerberg can do more to change the world as a philanthropist than as President of the United States. After all, he can buy and sell Donald Trump ten times over.
