Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted it is not fair he has so much money
Billionaire Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think anyone deserves to be as rich as him.
The tech boss made the revelation in front of employees at a weekly business conference at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California.
Mr Zuckerberg, 35, was responding to a worker who asked for his view on US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ comments “billionaires shouldn't exist”.
He said: “I don’t know if I have an exact threshold on what amount someone should have.
"At some level, no-one deserves to have that much money.
“I think that if you do something that is good, you should get rewarded. But I do think that some of the wealth that is accumulated is unreasonable.”
Mr Zuckerberg has promised to donate 99% of his Facebook shares, along with wife Priscilla Chan, to charity in their lifetime.
He added he understood Mr Sanders point of view and also got the criticism rich people giving to charity may not be optimal.
Mr Zuckerberg, who has an estimated wealth of $65 billion (£52b) and is thought to be the world’s fifth-richest man, added: “On some level it is not fair, but it may be optimal in that it is better than the alternative, which is that the government chooses the funding for all of the stuff (scientific research)”.
The Facebook founder also spoke about other issues faced by the social network, during the session which was live-streamed online for the first time, after a transcript from a previous event was leaked.
READ MORE YAHOO NEWS HERE
EU’s tougher controls on Facebook a ‘troubling development’ – Zuckerberg
US, UK and Australia urge Facebook to create backdoor access to encrypted messages
British police to demand data from US tech giants directly after delays to paedophile investigations
He called an EU ruling that allows a country to order the removal of defamatory material globally as a “troubling development”.
On Thursday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided that any individual country in the EU should be able to force social networks to restrict global access to defamatory posts declared as illegal.
There was also a question about Facebook’s messaging encryption plans, following news of an agreement between the UK and US on sharing data to speed up investigations into online activity by criminals.
In a letter to Mr Zuckerberg, the Home Secretary Priti Patel and her counterparts in the US and Australia outlined their fears that encryption could hinder law enforcement trying to investigate child abusers and terrorists operating online.
The Facebook CEO said: “These are some of the hardest decisions we have to make, trading off these equities that are really heavy and what I can commit, and the reason why we announced that we wanted to move to end-to-end encryption a year or two in advance of actually doing it, is so we could work with law enforcement and work with NCMEC (National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children) and work with a lot of other organisations around the world to make sure that we do the mitigation as best as we possibly can.”
