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Besides Zuckerberg, which tech moguls support healthcare the most?

It’s not just Zuck: Tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Sean Parker and Gordon Moore have donated many millions to support healthcare and medical research.

By Meghana Keshavan on December 01, 2015

In an open letter to his new daughter, Max, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he and his wife will be donating 99 percent of their Facebook shares – about $45 billion – to issues like healthcare and social equality over the course of their lifetimes.

“We will do our part to make this happen, not only because we love you, but also because we have a moral responsibility to all children in the next generation,” Zuckerberg writes.

This is an immense pledge – and follows suit in a long line of tech entrepreneurs that are donating their wealth to medical research and healthcare.

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Take Sean Parker, for instance, who helped Zuckerberg launch Facebook in its early days: Just last year, he pledged a $24 million gift to Stanford University to set up a new institute for allergy research.

Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, has donated $100 million to University of California Davis’ nursing school – and more than a billion more to scientific and conservancy endeavors.

Bill Gates is the most glaring example of using tech-generated wealth for charitable purposes. The Gates Foundation has given away some $28 billion in a mission similar to Zuckerberg’s – improving health, education and economic development around the world. This includes some $755 million to eradicate polio, and $500 million to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, as Entrepreneur points out.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has donated $20 million to a Seattle-based cancer center. Google CEO Larry Page donated “millions” to voice loss research – supporting a condition he happens to have.

Given that Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, is a physician, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a special focus on medical care – hence a special focus on disease eradication. He writes:

Consider disease. Today we spend about 50 times more as a society treating people who are sick than we invest in research so you won’t get sick in the first place.
Medicine has only been a real science for less than 100 years, and we’ve already seen complete cures for some diseases and good progress for others. As technology accelerates, we have a real shot at preventing, curing or managing all or most of the rest in the next 100 years.
Today, most people die from five things — heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurodegenerative and infectious diseases — and we can make faster progress on these and other problems.
Once we recognize that your generation and your children’s generation may not have to suffer from disease, we collectively have a responsibility to tilt our investments a bit more towards the future to make this reality. Your mother and I want to do our part.
Curing disease will take time. Over short periods of five or ten years, it may not seem like we’re making much of a difference. But over the long term, seeds planted now will grow, and one day, you or your children will see what we can only imagine: a world without suffering from disease.
Zuckerberg and Chan are opening a new school in Palo Alto that plans to espouse the ideals he writes about in this blog. The new K-12 school, called “The Primary School,” will be a nonprofit and private institution slated to open in August 2016.
“It’s a new kind of school that brings education and healthcare together,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post in October. It’ll be geared toward low-income students, funded by Zuckerberg and Chan, and will have an onsite clinic that will provide medical and dental care for students and their families.
Zuckerberg and his wife also donated $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital earlier this year.  Chan completed her residency at the hospital.