Transcript
0:00 Mark Zuckerberg is worth almost a quarter of a trillion dollars, and his three daughters will never inherit most of it. In 2015, he promised to give away 99% of his Facebook shares in a letter to a newborn baby. Right now, he is betting up to 200 billion more on artificial intelligence. So why would a man build all of this and then make sure his own children never get it? The answer is hidden in that letter. >> We're going to write this check for like 100 billion dollars. 200 billion.
0:32 Then we'd better build the smartest machine on earth. >> Alex, are you sure this is going to work? >> One data center that would cover much of Manhattan, power plants built just to feed it. Researchers paid like movie stars, and this is not the first time he has bet everything. At 22, he turned down a billion dollars. At 28, his company stock crashed in its first week of trading. At 38, he lost more than 100 billion dollars in a single year, betting on a virtual world almost nobody wanted.
1:06 Every time people said he was finished, every time he came back richer. To find the answer, you need to see every time this man said no to money that would have ended the story. And it starts long before Harvard with a 12-year-old who wired his father's office. Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984. His father, Edward, was a dentist who ran his practice out of the family home.
1:37 His mother, Karen, was a psychiatrist who gave up her practice to raise four children. Mark was the only boy and the one who could not sit still. When he was about 12, his father's office had a problem. The receptionist had to walk down the hall every time a patient arrived. So Mark wrote a program that linked every computer in the house and the office and let them send to each other. The family called it ZuckNet. It came out a year before AOL launched its famous instant messenger.
2:07 >> So the front desk can tell me a patient is here without shouting? >> Without shouting. Just a ping. >> His father hired a private computer tutor. Within months the tutor admitted the boy was ahead of him. At Phillips Exeter, one of the most elite boarding schools in America, Mark captained the fencing team and read the classics in Latin and ancient Greek. And with a friend he built a music player called Synapse that learned what you liked to hear. Big tech companies came calling including Microsoft. He said no and went to college instead.
2:41 That was no number one. Remember that word. No. It is going to cost him his friends, his reputation and more than once billions of dollars. And it is the reason he is still in charge today. Kirkland House, Harvard University, the fall of 2003. Mark is a sophomore studying psychology and computer science. His room is a mess of whiteboards and empty bottles. He has already built Course Match, a site that shows students which classes their friends are taking. Now he wants something bigger.
3:17 On a night in late October after being upset over a girl he starts coding. He pulls student photos from the online directories of Harvard's houses, some of which he gets into without permission. He puts two faces side by side and asks one question. Who is hotter? He calls it Face Match. >> Mark, the network's dying. Everybody's on your site. >> Already? It's been 4 hours. >> In its first hours around 450 people voted more than 22,000 times. The traffic slowed Harvard's network to a crawl. Student groups were furious and they had every right to be. The administration shut it down within days and Mark was hauled before the disciplinary board for breaching security, copyright, and privacy. He apologized and kept his place at Harvard.
4:08 His friends were so sure he would be expelled that they threw him a going away party. Standing in line for the bathroom at that party, he met a student named Priscilla Chan. Remember her. She is the reason this story ends the way it does. But he had learned something the deans had missed. People could not stop looking at each other. Students were begging for an online directory with real names and real faces. Harvard kept promising one and never shipped it. So Mark built it himself. On February 4, 2004, he launched the facebook.com from his dorm room. Within 24 hours, somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 students had signed up. Within a month, more than half of Harvard's undergraduates were on it. By the end of the year, it had 1 million users. And 6 days after launch, the first people who wanted a piece of it showed up.
5:06 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were twins, 6 ft 5, Olympic level rowers, and the sons of a wealthy consultant. With their classmate Divya Narendra, they had hired Mark months earlier to help code their own social site called Harvard Connection. Mark kept stalling. Then he launched his own. >> You were building our site. Then you built your own. >> Hm? I built something better. >> That's not the same thing. >> The twins said he stole their idea. Mark said an idea is not a company. They would fight for 4 years, and in 2008, they settled for 20 million dollars in cash plus shares in Facebook. At the time, the deal was valued at around 65 million. Those shares alone would later be worth hundreds of millions. And the twins put part of that money into Bitcoin when almost nobody wanted it.
5:57 Today, they are billionaires, too. Losing to Mark, Zuckerberg turned out to be the best trade of their lives. The second fight hurt more because it was with his best friend. Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian born economic student, put up the first real money and became the business manager. the summer of 2004, moved to Palo Alto with a few friends. rented a house with a zip line over the pool. Eduardo stayed on the East Coast for an internship and froze the company's bank account in protest when he felt shut out.
6:31 >> Mark, you can't run my company from a swimming pool. >> It's not your company. It's ours. Come out here and build it. >> He didn't come. When the company was restructured, his stake was diluted from roughly a third of the company to a sliver of 1% according to the lawsuit he filed. They settled in 2009. Eduardo kept his title as co-founder and enough shares to become a billionaire, but the friendship never came back. In 2011, just before the IPO, Eduardo gave up his American citizenship and moved to Singapore. Today, he is worth more than $30 billion.
7:09 Into that empty seat walked two men who would change Mark's life. Sean Parker, the 24 year old co-founder of Napster, became president and taught Mark the most important lesson of his career. Never give up control. And Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, wrote Facebook's first outside check, $500,000 for about 10% of the company. In the spring of 2005, the venture firm Accel valued it at $98 million. Around then, Parker hired a graffiti artist named David Choe to paint the walls of their new office. Choe took his fee in Facebook shares instead of cash.
7:49 By the IPO, those shares were reportedly worth around $200 million, the most expensive paint job in history. Mark was barely 21 and very soon someone was going to offer him a billion dollars to walk away. Summer 2006, Yahoo was one of the most powerful companies on the internet and it wanted Facebook. The offer was $1 billion in cash. Mark would have walked away at 22 with hundreds of millions of his own. His investors wanted him to take it. His executives wanted him to take it. Almost everybody did.
8:28 >> It's a billion dollars, Mark. Nobody says no to a billion dollars. I don't know what I'd do with the money. I'd just start another social network. I kind of like the one I already have. >> He said no. No number two and the one that nearly cost him everything. Years later he admitted the hardest part wasn't the decision. It was what came after. Within about 18 months almost his entire management team was gone. People who had believed in him decided he was a kid who didn't know what he was doing. Then that September he launched News Feed, the endless scroll of your friends updates. Users hated it.
9:08 Hundreds of thousands joined protest groups organized on Facebook itself, the very thing they were protesting. Mark apologized, added privacy controls and kept the feature. Within weeks people were spending more time on Facebook than ever. That same month Facebook opened to anyone over 13 with an email address. In 2007 Microsoft paid $240 million for just 1.6% of the company. That valued Facebook at $15 billion.
9:40 The billion that Yahoo offered now looked like pocket change. By 2010 Hollywood made a movie about him called The Social Network. It made him look cold, lonely and ruthless. Time magazine named him Person of the Year. And that same year at just 26 he signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half his fortune. Most people barely noticed. They should have. It was the first clue to where all this money was going.
10:12 May 18, 2012, Facebook goes public at $38 a share, valuing the company at $104 billion. It was the biggest debut ever for an American tech company at the time. The next day, Mark married Priscilla Chan, the girl from the bathroom line at his going away party. She had just finished medical school. >> $38 and change, that's it? >> That's it. Underwriters are holding it up with both hands.
10:42 >> Then it fell apart. Trading glitches, a flood of sellers, and fears that Facebook couldn't make money on mobile phones. Within a week, the stock was down more than 16%. By that fall, it had lost about half its value. People called it the most hyped flop in Wall Street history. Mark's answer was ruthless. He ordered every team to rebuild for the phone, and he started buying anyone who could become the next Facebook 6 weeks before the IPO. Oh, he had paid $1 billion for Instagram, a photo app with 13 employees and no revenue. People laughed. Today, it is worth many times that. In 2014, he paid around $19 billion for WhatsApp, a messaging app with 55 employees. That is about $345 million per employee.
11:34 Then $2 billion for Oculus, a startup making virtual reality headsets. >> $19 billion for a chat app with no ads. He's not buying the app. He's buying the future. >> By 2017, $2 billion people were using Facebook every month. Mark was worth more than $70 billion. He was also about to find out what happens when you connect everyone on Earth and lose track of where their data goes.
12:05 March 2018, the world learns that a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook users, most of whom never agreed to it, and used it to target voters. Overnight, Facebook went from the company that connected the world to the company that sold it out. Within 10 days, about $100 billion was wiped off its market value. On April 10, 2018, Mark sat in front of the United States Senate in a dark suit and a booster cushion and answered questions for 5 hours. Some of the senators clearly did not understand what Facebook was.
12:46 >> How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? >> Senator, we run ads. >> The clip went viral, but the damage was real. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion, the largest privacy penalty in its history. Mark agreed to new oversight that limited how he could run his own company. He decided he needed to change the story, not with an apology, with a whole new world. It would become the most expensive bet of his life until the next one.
13:24 October 28, 2021, Mark walks onto a virtual stage and announces that Facebook is changing its name. From now on, it is Meta. The future, he says, is the metaverse, a virtual world you will live, work, and play in through a headset. >> Can you see my legs? >> Nobody can see your legs. That's the problem. >> Mhm. The metaverse cost a fortune. Meta's virtual reality division, Reality Labs, lost more than $10 billion in 2021 alone and kept losing billions every single quarter.
14:00 By the middle of 2026, its total losses had reached about $88 billion. Avatars without legs became an internet joke. Then 2022 hit. Apple changed its privacy rules and blew a hole in Facebook's ad business. TikTok was stealing young users. Interest rates soared. In February 2022, Meta lost about $230 billion in market value in a single day. At that point, the biggest one-day wipeout in American stock market history. By that November, Meta's stock had fallen more than 70% from its peak. Mark's personal fortune had fallen by more than $100 billion.
14:45 He laid off 11,000 people, then 10,000 more. He called 2023 the year of efficiencies. >> Where did everybody go? Hm. Year of efficiency, they're calling it. >> And then something strange happened. The cuts worked. Profits came back. The stock roared. By 2024, Mark was richer than ever. The man who had lost $100 billion got it all back and more and decided to bet even bigger.
15:18 The new bet was artificial intelligence, and at first, he was losing. In April 2025, Meta released its Llama 4 models, and they disappointed. The biggest one never shipped at all. Rivals like OpenAI and Google pulled ahead. So Mark did what he always does. He went shopping. In June 2025, Meta paid about $14.3 billion for nearly half of Scale AI and brought in its 28-year-old founder, Alexander Wang, to run a new team called Meta Superintelligence Labs. Then Mark started calling top researchers himself.
15:57 Reports said some offers reached $100 million. >> You know what OpenAI is paying me? >> I don't care what they're paying you. Name your number. >> He also started building a cluster called Prometheus in Ohio. Passed 1 gigawatt of power. Another called Hyperion in Louisiana planned to reach 5 on a site so big that Mark said it would cover a large part of Manhattan. That is when he sat across from Alex Wang and asked his question.
16:28 are you sure this is going to work? April 2026, Meta launched its new AI family called Muse, and the stock jumped 6 and 1/2 % in a day. On September 20, the Muse app hit number one on Apple's US App Store ahead of ChatGPT. Within 40 days, it passed 10 million downloads in the US alone, the fastest start for a Meta app since Threads. But the bill keeps growing. Meta now expects to spend between $135 and $145 billion this year alone, and free cash flow turned negative.
17:05 The day after those earnings, the stock fell almost 8 %. So is he a genius or is he doing it again? He has already given his answer. If Meta ends up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars, he said that would be very unfortunate. But he thinks the bigger risk is moving too slowly. Either way, he is riding the check. And that brings us back to the question from the beginning. Who gets all this money when he is gone?
17:35 Late 2015, Mark and Priscilla's first daughter, Max, is born. On December 1, they publish a letter to her on Facebook. This is the letter from the beginning of our story. It talks about curing disease, connecting people, and giving every child a chance. And buried in it is a promise. During their lifetimes, they will give away 99% of their Facebook shares. At the time, that was worth about $45 billion. >> Are you really going to tell the whole world in a letter?
18:05 >> I want her to know what it's for. Before she knows what it's worth. >> They now have three daughters, Max, August, and Aurelia. Each will grow up rich beyond anything most people can imagine. But the bulk of their father's fortune is promised to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Here is the twist. The Chan Zuckerberg initiative is not a normal charity. It is a limited liability company. It can invest, fund political causes, and make a profit. And it lets Mark keep voting the shares he gives to it. Critics call it philanthropy with a steering wheel.
18:42 Its biggest goal is enormous. In 2016, Mark and Priscilla said they wanted to help cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of this century. They created the Bio Hub, a network of research labs. And in late 2025, they turned the whole initiative toward one thing using artificial intelligence to understand the human cell. >> Every cell type in the human body mapped in one model. >> And it's paid for by Facebook ads.
19:12 >> Which leads to the biggest irony in the story. Mark Zuckerberg has spent 20 years refusing to give up control. He said no to Yahoo. He said no to Microsoft. His special shares give him about 60% of the votes at Meta, even though he owns only about 13% of the company. And in October 2026, when a proposed California wealth tax threatened to force him to sell some of those shares, Meta created a brand new class of stock with no voting rights at all.
19:44 It lets him raise cash without ever losing his grip. Two weeks later, California voters rejected the tax anyway. So his daughters will not inherit most of the money. But the money will not leave the family's hands either. It will flow through a company that Mark and Priscilla control toward goals that Mark and Priscilla choose. He is not just giving his fortune away. He is deciding decades in advance exactly what it will do. A dentist's son wired his father's office so nobody had to shout down the hall.
20:17 30 years later, he controls the apps used by more than three and a half billion people every day. He said no to a billion dollars, lost a hundred billion in a single year, and is now writing a two hundred billion dollar check on a bet nobody can guarantee, not even him. If the AI bet works, it could become the most valuable thing he has ever built. If it doesn't, it could be the most expensive mistake in corporate history.
20:44 Either way, the money is already promised, not to his children, but to a war on disease that he hopes will outlive him. The kid who got in trouble for Face Mash might end up remembered for curing something or for losing everything on a machine he wasn't sure would work. So here is our question for you. If you had a quarter of a trillion dollars, would you give 99% of it away? Tell us in the comments. This is the Capital Noir Files. Subscribe for the stories behind the money.