The billionaire philanthropists who also call the shots at major tech companies often take pains to distinguish between their day jobs as C.E.O.s and their side gigs as philanthropists. But in reality it’s not so simple for these masters of the universe to silo these two facets of their work, even if they try.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg, who is the C.E.O. not just of Facebook but also of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy through which he and his wife and co-C.E.O., Priscilla Chan, have promised to give away 99 percent of their $100 billion fortune. Last year, I wrote a piece at Recode, which still holds, about the ways that all the problems at Facebook over the last few years have ricocheted onto C.Z.I., which is, of course, a separate company. But C.Z.I. is run in part by the same person, funded by the same stock, and affected by the same political headwinds.
