Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan will give 99% of their wealth to charity

The two had their first-ever joint interview with Gayle King on CBS This Morning.

The two announced, during their joint interview that they will steer 99% of their wealth (mostly in the form of Facebook stock) to charity through their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).

The letter announcing the initiative came out a few days after the couple welcomed their first daughter, Max. Zuckerberg admitted to working on while his wife was in labour and he said “in retrospect” it was “not my best thing”.

They shared that through their foundation, they will award millions of dollars that will go to eliminating all disease and improving equity in education.

Zuckerberg said: “There are a lot of philanthropies that try to bring capital, right? And help fund important work. But there aren’t that many that have the capability to build tools to empower different folks who are on the front lines”.

“Teachers, doctors, scientists — we don’t have the right tools to do that. And Mark has such incredible experience of building tools,” Chan added.

Replying Gayle’s question on how they plan to “eliminate all disease,” Zuckerberg replied:

“Well, we’re not going to do that ourselves, but… we do think that it will be possible to cure, prevent, or be able to manage all diseases by the end of this century”.

Chan said one of those goals is to map every single cell in the human body, adding: “You would think that we already know all the cells and what they do, and the thing is, we don’t … and we need a reference.”

Zuckerberg said such a biological map could serve as a “very basic building block for a lot of biological research to happen on top of that.”

Read their full interview here, and watch it below:

.@facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have promised 99% of their personal wealth to their charitable initiative, @ChanZuckerberg.

"Setting audacious goals is important, and we need to think about beyond what's possible." https://t.co/j7TCHi1oLJ pic.twitter.com/q0vTSWKokP

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) December 3, 2019