Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were the second-largest philanthropists in America last year as they gave away nearly half a billion dollars.
With $498.8m in contributions to charitable causes, 28-year-old zuckerberg and his wife were only behind billionaire Warren Buffett ($3.1bn) on a list of the nation’s most generous philanthropists, CNN reported on Wednesday.
According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Facebook founder and CEO was one of three tech-industry titans in the list’s top five.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was fourth, with $309 million in contributions, mostly to the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and wife Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of genetic-testing company 23andME, were fifth, putting $223 million into their Brin Wojcicki Foundation. The other, No. 3 on the list, was hedge-fund creator John Arnold and his wife, Laura.
Zuckerberg, whose net worth is believed to be around $12 billion despite a rocky start for Facebook’s stock, made his first big splash in the philanthropy space in 2010, when he pledged $100 million to public schools in Newark, New Jersey.
