Working for Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy isn’t always easy since it means working for Mark Zuckerberg
“Although we are separate organizations with different missions and teams, we know it must be frustrating to feel like your work is impacted by an organization you don’t work for,” said Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. | Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Inside the unrest at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. At an emotional company town hall last week that blew past its hour-long time limit, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s engineers asked him to quit as CEO of Facebook.
But the appeal did not, as one might expect, come from an engineer at Facebook. It came from an engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the education, science, and policy philanthropy Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, founded in 2015.
“You and Priscilla have emphasized that Facebook and CZI are two separate organizations. This is true, but we have the same leader — you,” the CZI employee said, according to a video of the remarks viewed by Recode. “The actions you take at Facebook reflect on you as a leader and your leadership skills and values. It only reflects reality to say that our leader’s idea of free speech values calls to murder people for demonstrating over the political speech of the demonstrators themselves.”
That’s when the employee presented one of the richest people in the world with three choices: Either moderate these inflammatory posts of Donald Trump, resign from Facebook, or resign from CZI.
“I mean, no. None of those things would make sense,” said Zuckerberg, who seemed to be taken aback. Then, a few minutes later, he flipped the tables on the resignation question: “These organizations are different, but I do think that they come from some common sets of values. And I think at the end of the day, you all need to make whatever decisions you think are right in terms of wanting to work in an organization that is associated with a leader who is making other decisions that you may disagree with.”
Zuckerberg ended with this plain matter of fact: “Quite frankly, the idea that we would resign from CZI is ridiculous.”
Ridiculous or not, that one employee was speaking for a group of employees who over the past few years have found it difficult to work for the philanthropy that — although legally distinct from Facebook — is inextricably linked to a business empire they find disreputable. And in recent weeks, years of built-up angst at CZI have come spilling out, due to the ongoing protests in the US calling for an end to systemic racism after the killings of several Black Americans. These CZI employees take particular issue with the unwillingness of their boss, Zuckerberg, to place restrictions on Trump’s Facebook posts about the protests , in which he wrote, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The line between the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg’s $80 billion-plus charity, and Facebook, his $600 billion-plus public company, legally...
