Why Did Facebook CEO Decide To Donate $100 Million To Newark's Public Schools?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo hide caption
The billionaire tells TechCrunch he picked his beneficiary because of his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan:
When she graduated from school, she went and became a teacher. Now, she’s in medical school and she’s studying to be a pediatrician. But this is just kind of a common thing that we’ve been really interested in – about education, kids. And, you know, the default path that we were on, we’re just like, okay, a lot of other people wait until later on in their career to figure out how to give back. Then we decided – this is just like a year ago, maybe nine months ago, I said, why should we wait? I mean, most people don’t have this kind of success early on in life. We feel really lucky so we should be researching this now. And we decided early on that the thing that we wanted to try to help out with was education. It’s just that there are so many things that are broken in the education system across the country now. The national education budget is 600 billion dollars that goes towards all of education. So it’s kind of crazy, right?
Right.
Zuckerberg is expected to make the official announcement on The Oprah Winfrey Show today, with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Newark's mayor, Cory Booker.