Money and power... and charity

Hey there, it’s Kurt Wagner in Denver. Meta’s new quarterly dividend could maybe rid the world of disease. But first...Three things you need [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey there, it’s Kurt Wagner in Denver. Meta’s new quarterly dividend could maybe rid the world of disease. But first... Three things you need to know today: • ByteDance’s China CEO [is stepping down]( • Disney will put $1.5 billion [in Fortnite’s developer]( • Roblox reported its highest [revenue on record]( Free money Several years ago, paired with the announcement of the birth of his first child, Mark Zuckerberg pledged to give away 99% of his Facebook shares to philanthropy during his lifetime. It’s a fortune now [worth almost $165 billion](, and the vehicle for those donations has largely been Zuckerberg’s investment company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which he runs with his wife Priscilla Chan and focuses on things like curing diseases and criminal justice reform. It’s a generous effort, but it also creates an inevitable reality: For Zuckerberg to give away his stock, he must also give up control of the company he founded. The Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive officer currently controls around 61% of the company’s voting power and is in no immediate risk of dipping below the 50% threshold that would mean losing sole control. But the vast majority of Zuckerberg’s wealth is tied up in Class B shares, a special kind of stock that carries 10 votes per share instead of the standard one vote for Class A stock that everyone else can buy. That means that almost every time Zuckerberg sells a share to fund CZI, he’s giving up 10 votes. As he keeps selling, his grip decreases significantly. So why am I telling you all this? Meta’s [new dividend](, obviously! Zuckerberg, 39, recently started selling shares again after a multi-year break, and the timing coincides with a major new update from Meta: Last week, the company announced a small quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share. That means Zuckerberg will make roughly $700 million per year (pre-tax) without selling any of his shares at all. That’s a lot of money for someone to donate each year. According to [CZI’s website](, the company has doled out $6.8 billion in grants and other investments since its inception in 2015. That equates to roughly $750 million per year. In other words, Zuckerberg’s new dividend payments could cover a good portion of CZI’s investments without him losing any more ownership control at Meta. This is a much better solution, as far as shareholders are concerned, than what Zuckerberg tried in 2017. Facebook had proposed a [stock split]( to create a new class of non-voting shares. The company backed off the plan when shareholders sued. “The idea was that it would allow me to keep voting control of Facebook so we can continue to build for the long term but also allow Priscilla and me to fund the work we’re doing through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” he [wrote at the time](. Fortunately for Zuckerberg, Facebook’s business then was doing so well it didn’t really matter. “The value of our stock has grown to the point that I can fully fund our philanthropy and retain voting control of Facebook for 20 years or more,” he said. Meta has grown more valuable since that post (putting aside a dark period in 2022 and 2023). Even without the dividend, Zuckerberg has wiggle room. A rough estimate suggests Zuckerberg would need to sell over $30 billion worth of stock to fall below 50% ownership. That’s a lot of selling. With a dividend, he may not need to sell at all — at least not for a while. —[Kurt Wagner](mailto:kwagner71@bloomberg.net) The big story Elon Musk said he’ll help fund a project that [uses AI to digitally decipher formerly unreadable Roman scrolls](. The effort, known as the Vesuvius Challenge, is run by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. One to watch [Watch the Bloomberg Technology TV interview]( with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Get fully charged DoorDash, the top restaurant delivery company in the US, is [aiming to expand overseas](. US regulators criticized Microsoft’s plans to cut 1,900 jobs from its video game division in a [letter to an appeals court](. Chinese state-sponsored hacking group Volt Typhoon has been hiding in some US networks for [at least five years](. PayPal expects earnings to be [flat in 2024]( as it works on cutting costs. The French payment processor Worldline will [cut about 1,400 jobs](, touting annual savings of €200 million. 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