Last week, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s engineers asked him to resign as Facebook CEO.
But the engineer didn't even work for Facebook. They work for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropy.
We go deep on the unrest at Zuckerberg’s charity.
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1. Resign as CEO of Facebook
2. Resign as CEO of CZI
3. Moderate Trump's content
That's when Zuckerberg flipped the tables.
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For starters, the Cambridge Analytica scandal ended up temporarily killing a political data startup that CZI acquired called Deck.
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They decided against it — turning down free money! — because they saw it as "dirty" Facebook millions.
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"Basically anything that we did at CZI was gated by whether it would drastically affect Facebook or not,” they said. “I eventually left the company thinking that CZI was Facebook’s PR machine.”
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"Trump is going to be judged by what he said. And it’s not going to be judged well, from my opinion.”
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“One of the reasons I ended up leaving was that I could no longer put aside this feeling of shame and almost guilt."
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But it is giving the money through an intermediary in part to manage any blowback from conservatives, a source says. (CZI disputes that's why.)
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When Cambridge Analytica happened and Facebook's stock tanked, some employees at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative thought it could affect their budget.
Facebook was still worth hundreds of billions!
vox.com/recode/2020/6/…
Billionaires like to point to their philanthropy to justify their net worths. They cast the charity work as independent from their corporate practices.
But what the CZI story shows is that these are not so easily segregable.
vox.com/recode/2020/6/…