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Philanthropy

How the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Plans to Save the World: An Update

Jim Schaffer
October 17, 2016
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October 11, 2016; CNBC

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan recently committed $3 billion over the next decade to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases. The National Cancer Institute alone spends $5.21 billion a year on its quest to tackle its one dreaded disease. What do Zuckerberg and Chan know that everyone else is missing? Besides, when Zuckerberg can make $3.4 billion in one hour, why not double the money and end death by disease within five years?

Zuckerberg and Chan believe that curing diseases and meeting their other philanthropic objectives is merely a technical challenge. CNBC reports that they just hired Brian Pinkerton (Amazon’s Vice President of Search and the General Manager of Amazon’s search and ad technology group) to be the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) Chief Technology Officer. That is to say, CZI’s just hired their thought leader. In announcing Pinkerton’s appointment on Facebook, Zuckerberg said this:

Our approach is to use engineering to create social change. This is different from most philanthropy. Lots of people invest capital and hard work, but when you can also do engineering to build tools to empower people to make changes themselves, that’s when s