Priscilla Chan is running one of the most ambitious philanthropies in the world
Priscilla Chan remembers the moment she decided to become a doctor.
She was a 21-year-old undergrad at Harvard College working at an after-school program for students from a nearby low-income housing project. One of those students, a young girl, had gone missing for a few days. When she returned, Chan was shocked to find that the girl’s two front teeth were broken.
“I was flooded and overwhelmed,” Chan would tell Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg more than a decade later. “What happened? Did someone hurt her? Has she got help for this? And like, what could I have done to actually prevent this?”
It was a moment that propelled Chan to UCSF School of Medicine, and also ignited her interest in education. Fast-forward 10 years, Chan is now a licensed pediatrician and a teacher who founded her own school. She’s also the first lady of Facebook, wife and partner to Silicon Valley’s most well known tech executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and mother to a 1-year-old daughter — with another on the way — and the most famous dog on the internet, a Hungarian sheepdog named Beast.
But in the past 18 months, Chan has added a new job to her resume: She’s also in charge of what will likely be one of the most well-funded philanthropies in human history.
Chan is running the day-to-day operations of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic investment company she created with her husband in late 2015, announced along with the birth of their first daughter, Max.
Known more colloquially as CZI, the relatively new effort has an ambitious tagline: “Advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity.” Practically, that means Chan and Zuckerberg are focused on improving industries like education, medicine and even the criminal justice system. Some of their efforts have been straightforward and should have an immediate impact. Earlier this year, for example, CZI donated roughly $3 million to a nonprofit that gives students around the country free eye exams and glasses.
Other plans are so ambitious and grand as to seem almost fantastical. Last fall, CZI pledged $3 billion over the next decade to try and “cure all diseases” in their daughter’s lifetime. Chan has been vocal about the organization’s involvement in trying to map every cell in the human body, and CZI is spending $50 million over the next five years to fund research by scientists and engineers it calls “investigators,” like this Stanford professor developing a $1 microscope. Chan is also working with Summit Public Schools in California to fundamentally change the education system — she wants students around the country to be taught differently.
To try and turn these ideas into reality, Zuckerberg and Chan have pledged to spend 99 percent of their Facebook fortune over their lifetime to help fulfill that commitment. Today, that fortune is worth more than $63 billion, and Zuckerberg has started to sell his Facebook shares to fund their efforts.
For context, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s preeminent philanthropies and the one CZI will most likely be compared to in the years to come, had an endowment of nearly $40 billion in 2015, not including another $37 billion it had already given away.