Technology
Who is Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan?
MARK Zuckerberg is the founder of social network giant Facebook who has pledged to give most of his wealth to charity during his lifetime.
He’s been known as a genius entrepreneur and philanthropist, but here’s everything we know about his wife.
Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have two children[/caption]
Who is the Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan?
Priscilla Chan, 36, is an American philanthropist and paediatrician.
Priscilla’s parents were Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam in boats and she grew up speaking both Cantonese and English.
In 2003 Priscilla graduated as class valedictorian, the highest ranking student among her peers, and she was voted “class genius” by her fellow students.
Priscilla then attended Harvard University where she met and began dating Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook.
After graduating with a BA in biology in 2007, Priscilla continued her education and in 2015 she finished her paediatric residency.
The couple dated for 9 years before they decided to tie the knot in 2012.
On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan announced the birth of their first daughter Max,
On August 28, 2017, they announced the birth of their second child August.
What kind of work and charity does Priscilla Chan do?
Priscilla began her residency as a pediatrician at San Francisco General Hospital. She warned her attending physician, “I want to tell you up front: I’m a crier,” according to Quartz.
That doesn’t mean you should confuse her emotions for weakness.
“There was this horrific fire, multiple kids getting burned really badly,” Ryan Padrez, the chief resident who oversaw Chan’s pediatric trauma work at the hospital, told QZ. “Priscilla was the first responder, at two in the morning, and she calls me on my phone, ‘Just start driving now, I’ll fill you in in the car.’ She was so calm under pressure, really quick thinking.”
Priscilla co-founded Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with her husband in 2015. The nonprofit was founded “to leverage technology, community-driven solutions and collaboration to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.”
As co-CEO, Priscilla oversees an annual budget of $700 million to 800 million.
“Giving back has been part of my life before I even met Mark,” Priscilla said.
On March 9 it was reported that Mark and Priscilla put $4.2 million into a jobs program for Hawaiin county residents where they own a $100m compound. The program is called Rise to Work and it was created in 2020 for residents of the Kauai county who lost their jobs because of the pandemic.
Who is Mark Zuckerberg?
Mark Zuckerberg is the chairman, CEO and co-founder of social networking giant Facebook.
Born in New York in 1984, Zuckerberg already had a “reputation as a programming prodigy” when he started college.
While at Harvard, Zuckerberg launched a site called Face Mash, on which students ranked the attractiveness of their classmates.
Harvard shut the site down after its popularity crashed a network and Zuckerberg later apologised saying it was “completely improper”.
The following term he began working on an early version of Facebook.
The 36-year-old launched the social network from his dorm room on February 4, 20o4 with the help of fellow students.
The friends would end up embroiled in legal disputes as they challenged Zuckerberg for shares in the company.
Zuckerberg also faced action from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, as well as Divya Narendra who claimed he had stolen their idea – the disagreement was later turned into the film, The Social Network.
The tech prodigy dropped out of Harvard to focus on Facebook, but received an honorary degree in 2017.
Speaking about the site to Wired magazine in 2010 he said: “The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.”
By 2012 Facebook had one billion users. By June 2017 it had reached two billion users every month.
Facebook now has more than 2billion users every month[/caption]
Why will Mark Zuckerberg testify before congress?
The CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will all have to testify before the US Congress for a hearing on digital misinformation on March 25.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey already had to defend their policies to a Senate Judiciary Committee back in November.
MORE ON FACEBOOK
That hearing was regarding how the platforms moderated content in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.
The committee chairs revealed that the three big tech CEOs would be tesitfying in an official statement.
The statement explained: “Whether it be falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine or debunked claims of election fraud, these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety.”
