The Donation
Update: TechCrunch has an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where he explains his motivations for the Newark donation. The goal is to make Newark a symbol for other areas that positive changes can be made in the school system with a little help. Zuckerberg seems to have put some thought into this.
As we covered yesterday, Facebook is donating $100 million to help Newark schools. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will set up a foundation with $100 million in Facebook stock for improving education in America, with the focus being on Newark. This would cover 20% of the school system’s budget of $940 million. Zuckerberg will announce the donation today on Oprah, ending a week of education reform programming on the show.
The Facebook Movie
The movie “The Social Network” will be released today. This highly anticipated movie depicts Mark Zuckerberg as “an insecure jerk who screws over people and becomes a much-richer insecure jerk,” according to Media Memo. Zuckerberg is definitely the villain in the film, which is only loosely based on the reality of Facebook’s first year. Even if it’s mostly fiction, it could still be bad for Zuckerberg’s image.
The “Coincidence”
Many have speculated that these two events occuring on the same day is no coincidence. Zuckerberg donating $100 million to Newark schools on the same day that a movie damaging his reputation is released will definitely raise some eyebrows. According to sources close to Zuckerberg, he very badly wanted to delay the announcement to avoid such connections being made. These sources say that it was obviously not done on purpose because it would be such an obvious attempt to try and clean things up.
Sources close to the situation say that Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were the ones who chose the timing. Zuckerberg pushed for a delay, but caved under pressure from Booker and Christie, who scheduled the announcement to go along with events already scheduled.
The Outage
This all comes just after Facebook had the worst outage in four years. Facebook apologized for the 2.5 hour outage and explained what happened in a post. It amounts to their database being corrupted and the systems set up to prevent that from happening becoming confused. The solution to fixing Facebook was as familiar to techies as to anyone else: they turned it off and turned it back on.
Do you think that Zuckerberg scheduled the announcement of his philanthropy in order to save face, or is this all a happy (or unhappy) coincidence?
via The Daily Beast, The Wrap