Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has soared by about $5 billion in just the first two weeks of 2017, increasing faster than that of any other billionaire in the world, according to Forbes. Poor Mark, now he has to decide what to with all that money.
Well it will all eventually go to his non profit foundation the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Mark and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan established the Initiative after declaring their intention to give away 99 percent of their wealth to charity.
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Facebook’s shares are inching closer to October’s all-time high of above $133. They have also more than recouped the losses that the world’s biggest social media platform suffered right after Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. Zuckerberg’s net worth fell at that time by roughly 7 percent, to $49 billion.
Part of the reason that Facebook’s stock fell was the whole fake news scandal. Many people claimed that the proliferation of fake news affected the outcome of the 2016 Presidential elections and Mark Zuckerberg was personally called to task for not doing more to improve Facebook’s news feeds.
Then there was also the accusation last summer that some of the people who work on the Facebook news feeds had manipulated them in favor of their personal political biases.
Fortunately for Mark, Americans have notoriously short memories.
Mark Zuckerberg is now worth an estimated $53.8 billion, according to Forbes’s real-time rankings of the world’s billionaires. That makes him the fifth-richest person in the world, right behind Facebook investor Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Amancio Ortega of Spain, each of whom is worth more than $70 billion.
Zuckerberg is the only billionaire whose personal fortune consistently rises year after year since he was 19-yeas-old, when he founded Facebook on a lark as a college student. He never finished his education at Harvard, having dropped out to start Facebook. So kids — stay in school.
In 2016 he reached the top five on The Forbes 400 for the first time, placing fourth behind Gates, Buffett and Bezos.
