Over the past few years, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — which is backstopped by a Meta fortune that stands at roughly $220 billion — has been winding down its grantmaking focused on social inequities. That process now seems to be coming to a final end, according to an article last week by the San Francisco Standard. Eventually, it looks like nearly all of CZI’s giving will focus on scientific research.
I can’t recall another megadonor couple backtracking so completely from their early ambition, which they once said was to “build a more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.” I’m fascinated by Priscilla Chan’s role in all this. Five years ago, she was on her way to being one of the most important philanthropists of our time, and one with a strong progressive bent. Now, she seems to be receding from view — although I did see a photo of her at Trump’s inauguration.
It’s hard not to wonder if Chan has been waylaid by our post-woke times and a tech bro husband eager to keep the White House happy. Or maybe the story is quite different, one of pragmatic philanthropists winnowing down an expansive agenda to focus on the work they care about most. Another possibility is that Chan and Zuckerberg are among the many mainstream liberals who found themselves turned off by progressive advocates — so turned off they decided to stick to funding scientists. Whatever the explanation, they’re in the last stages of a dramatic philanthropic retreat, one with enormous consequences for multiple issue areas where the couple had become leading funders.
Priscilla Chan once piloted an expansive agenda at CZI
Eleven years ago, I published an article, “Four Things to Know About Priscilla Chan, and One Prediction,” that was filled with hope. I suggested that Chan was exactly the kind of person that you’d want to help give away a vast fortune.
She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents who fled Vietnam as refugees and worked long hours to rise into the middle class, while Chan was mostly raised by her grandparents, who didn’t speak English. She’s a pediatrician who’s seen the challenges that low-income people face in our healthcare system. Beyond her empathy, she has the smarts of a high school valedictorian turned Harvard grad.
When the day came that Chan gave up practicing medicine to become a full-time philanthropist — as I predicted she would — I imagined that she’d be a powerful leader of what would eventually become one of the world’s largest foundations.
Those hopes burned strong over the next few years as Chan and Zuckerberg stepped up their giving. While Zuck had famously made a mess of his first big foray into K-12 philanthropy, with a top-down debacle in Newark, Chan helped chart a very different direction. CZI’s education giving in Silicon Valley involved deeply listening to local stakeholders and a nuanced understanding of how socioeconomic forces affect student outcomes. Chan even started a tuition-free school for low-income children in distressed East Palo Alto, The Primary School, focusing on engaging the “whole student.”
The couple’s K-12 grantmaking seemed to mark an inflection point in how billionaires approached education. By 2016, fewer were embracing a dogmatic ed reform movement that pinned nearly all the blame for student outcomes on failing schools. Chan and Zuckerberg were among the new top ed donors, along with Steve and Connie Ballmer, who understood the huge impact of systemic inequities on educational opportunity.
I interviewed Chan in 2016, around the time she took the helm of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was then ramping up quickly. Under Chan’s leadership, CZI began an ambitious push to cure and prevent diseases, but also became a major funder of criminal justice reform. She and Zuckerberg visited San Quentin prison and held a roundtable in Birmingham, Alabama, where they met with community leaders, including the anti-death-penalty advocate Bryan Stevenson. Mark was said to have been influenced by Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
CZI’s expanding equity agenda also included backing for immigration advocacy and funding for housing issues in the Bay Area, among other local priorities. All the while, CZI grew its education funding, becoming one of the largest funders in that space.
Top philanthropists in retreat. But why?
Today, nearly all of these grantmaking priorities have been discontinued. CZI has spun off its criminal justice reform work, it’s cutting support to Bay Area organizations, and its future as a climate grantmaker looks limited at best. While education remains a focus of CZI, that work centers mainly on technological innovation following a retreat over several years from its previously expansive agenda. Last month, The Primary School announced it would close its doors next year, after Zuckerberg and Chan pulled their financial support.
Much speculation around the school’s closing, which came two months after CZI eliminated its DEI team, centered on Zuckerberg’s desire to distance himself from social justice work to curry favor with Trump. Those same themes dominate the San Francisco Standard‘s article, which quotes one grantee as saying, “They’re just trying to kiss up to Trump” and another commenting: “We’re saddened that CZI is moving toward censoring nonprofits, penalizing organizations that recommit to racial justice and social advocacy during these critical times.”
It’s important to stress that CZI began winding down its equity work several years ago. That retreat coincided with right-wing criticism of Zuckerberg and Chan for their massive nonpartisan donations to support voting administration during the 2020 election, which critics said aimed to elect Joe Biden. The right also accused Facebook of censoring conservative content. While such claims were baseless, they underscored a tension between Zuckerberg’s role as CEO of Facebook, a publicly held company that touches the lives of tens of millions of Americans, and his growing role as a philanthropist with a progressive agenda. Given that tension, you could see why Zuckerberg might want to pare down CZI’s agenda to an uncontroversial focus on scientific research.
Still, the latest funding cuts, along with CZI’s shuttering of its DEI work, fit a pattern of fearful billionaires bowing to Trump. In addition, Zuckerberg has an acute bottom-line interest in trying to nix the federal antitrust case against Meta that recently went to trial.
Megadonors are “works in progress”
Ultimately, we don’t know what’s really motivating Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, which is nearly always the case with highly guarded billionaire megadonors. I often note that such donors are a work in progress, constantly evolving. They are also often a mystery, unknowable even to those of us who imagine we can get “inside” philanthropy.
All we know in this case is that whatever ambitions Zuckerberg and Chan once had to “build a more inclusive, just” world are dead — at least for now. To be sure, the couple’s sharper philanthropic focus may increase their chances of making a bigger contribution to science and biomedical research, helping underwrite breakthroughs that could save and improve an untold number of lives. Their research grants are all the more critical given cuts to federal funding.
But when I think of the greatest challenges facing America and the world right now, a lack of progress on fighting diseases would not be on the top of my list, since nearly every week seems to bring news of some new medical advance, and the U.S. has made steady progress in recent years in lowering deaths from cancer, among diseases. On the other hand, the deep problems caused by economic and social inequalities are all around us — in the persistence of poverty, the grinding hardships of working families, our toxic politics, and so much more, including America’s declining longevity, a health problem that won’t be solved in a research lab.
In any case, Chan and Zuckerberg have enough money that they don’t need to make hard choices among priorities. They could outspend the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the biggest private funder of biomedical research, fourfold, and still have plenty of wealth left over to address the larger sicknesses in American life. As for fears about controversy, if Mark Zuckerberg can survive the many scandals that have enveloped Meta in recent years, including the damning revelations in the recent book “Careless People,” he can handle some heat for funding affordable housing in the Bay Area or helping poor kids.
It’s a shame that CZI’s ambitions are shrinking even as the fortune behind it keeps growing. Among other things, this means revising early assessments of the two megadonors in command of the world’s second-largest fortune, 99% of which has been pledged to philanthropy. I’ll let a jilted grantee have the last word on how Zuckerberg and Chan’s giving has evolved: “It shows the kind of character that they have… It really reflects on who they are as people.”
