There seems to be lot of emotion-laden writing about MZ&#x27;s pledge but I looked at his letter[1] to his daughter and this is what it actually says:<p><i>Our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality.
[...]
Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.
We will give 99% of our Facebook shares -- currently about $45 billion -- during our lives to advance this mission.</i><p>He didn&#x27;t actually use the word &quot;charity&quot;.  Was the term &quot;charity&quot; something that the media outlet pushed in its stories?  Now with the closer inspection of the LLC structure, the media looks to blast MZ for being dishonest about it being a charity?  Did MZ get free hero publicity by not explicitly stating it was <i>not</i> a 501c in his letter to the daughter?  I didn&#x27;t follow the story closely enough to judge if there was deception and media manipulation.<p>As for MZ going with the LLC structure, I think it&#x27;s just a general zeitgeist of tech-billionaires to believe that other institutions besides non-profits can make more progress on improving humanity.  A similar sentiment was Larry Page&#x27;s &quot;I&#x27;d rather give my billions to Elon Musk than charity&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t know if MZ and LP are &quot;right&quot; but I sort of see where they&#x27;re coming from.  I was looking at a startup that matched donors to charities and when I researched charities such as Pink Ribbon and Mother Theresa, etc, it really made me mistrust the whole landscape.  Yes, there are sites such as GiveWell but then I&#x27;d need to research the integrity of GiveWell itself which I never got around to pursuing.<p>I don&#x27;t know all the confluence of reasons but it does seem like traditional non-profits are not getting 100% mindshare of philanthropists.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;mark-zuckerberg&#x2F;a-letter-to-our-daughter&#x2F;10153375081581634?pnref=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;mark-zuckerberg&#x2F;a-letter-to-o...</a>