\n<\/p>\n
Priscilla Chan<\/a> met the moment with the kind of grace and sensitivity she\u2019d become known for. It was July 2020, George Floyd had recently been murdered, and staffers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative<\/a>\u2014the foundation she started with husband Mark Zuckerberg in 2015\u2014were hurting. Tissues on hand, eyes welling up, she hosted an all-hands Zoom to address them. \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel right to not actually just spend the time as an organization acknowledging the\u2014in medicine we call it \u2018acute on chronic\u2019\u2014racial disaster that is our country,\u201d she said, hands clasped in front of her, in a video obtained by Vanity Fair.<\/em> If there was a silver lining, it was that the moment was so bad, change was imperative\u2014both in the country at large and at CZI, whatever that would entail. \u201cThat\u2019s my little hopeful pearl that I want to try to add.\u2026 We stand with the Black community, we stand with our Black employees. It\u2019s felt harder and more important than ever to get a lot of our work right.\u201d The work would take time, she acknowledged, but she implored her employees to \u201ctake care of yourself, make sure you\u2019re giving yourself the space, the grace.\u201d<\/p>\n Four and a half years later, Chan appeared at President Donald Trump\u2019s second inauguration<\/a>, alongside her husband on the dais, a spot usually reserved for the president\u2019s nearest and dearest. Zuckerberg had been cozying up to MAGA<\/a> world for some time and had just come off an appearance on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast where he, buff and in a new gold chain, ragged on the Biden administration and lamented a lack of \u201cmasculine energy\u201d in the workplace. But to some, Chan looked uncomfortable at the inauguration, and the optics weren\u2019t computing. Through CZI, she\u2019d spent hundreds of millions on biomedical research, yet here she was standing a few feet from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of health and human services, a science skeptic. She appeared to make small talk with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was soon to cut billions in foreign aid, including for lifesaving HIV treatment in Africa. To many of Chan\u2019s colleagues and admirers from the philanthropy world, the image was distressing.<\/p>\n To them, Chan represented\u2014perhaps still does, they hope\u2014everything antithetical to the president she was honoring. If Trump was their idea of a nightmare billionaire, Chan was their dream. They knew her to be unflashy and disciplined, driven by the conviction that everyone deserves a chance to overcome the circumstance of their birth. She was profoundly empathetic, easily moved to tears at the suffering of others. What could she have been feeling, some of those contacts wondered, celebrating such a gleefully callous man? Later, Zuckerberg posted a photo of the two of them in black tie on their way to an inauguration party he was cohosting with the caption, \u201cFeeling optimistic.\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Seven months into the administration that appears to be gutting everything she has held dear\u2014scientific research, higher education, public health, caring for those in need\u2014it\u2019s hard to imagine that Chan, at least, is feeling optimistic, but she has remained largely silent. (Chan declined to be interviewed for this story.) Many former colleagues and admirers from nonprofit circles are searching for signs of the woman they knew and floating the questions. \u201cI know they are separate people\u2014and frankly, Priscilla comes off as a lot more human than Mark,\u201d says Lucia Reynoso, a former CZI engineer, \u201cbut they are married and gave the impression of a united front.\u201d So is she aligned with her husband? Has she been ideologically moved by the right-wing plutocracy? Or is she still working toward the greater good, maintaining her silence out of a sense of pragmatism?<\/p>\n If Trump had been president 50 years ago, Chan\u2019s parents might never have found their way to this country. They were ethnic Chinese immigrants from Vietnam who had each fled the war-torn country by boat. They met upon arrival in the US, married, and settled in the working-class neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts. They worked in a Chinese restaurant and raised three daughters. Priscilla was the eldest. At the local public high school, Chan excelled in science and on the tennis court, became valedictorian, and got into Harvard on a full scholarship\u2014the first person in her family to go to college.<\/p>\n It was there that she met Zuckerberg in October 2003, standing in line for the bathroom at a frat party. It was not his finest hour. He had just built Facemash, his \u201cwho\u2019s hotter\u201d website featuring images of Harvard girls side by side. The site had spread like wildfire on campus, and now he was set to go before Harvard\u2019s Administrative Board. But one can imagine he fulfilled a need in Chan. She\u2019d felt a sense of awe and alienation upon getting to Harvard, what with all the privileged, hypereducated kids in private school cliques. But here was one such boy, who\u2019d gone to Phillips Exeter Academy, and he was interested. He was a brilliant nerd who, she found, \u201cspeaks in a whole new language and lives in a framework that I\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d as she told The New Yorker<\/em> in 2018. He spent the months after they met building Facebook from his dorm room, then dropped out to go to Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, her life path presented itself to her when she met a girl from the Dorchester housing project, where Chan was mentoring. The girl\u2019s front teeth had been knocked out. It was heartbreaking to Chan, a biology major, and it confirmed to her a calling\u2014to serve children in need.<\/p>\n After she graduated in 2007, she joined Zuckerberg in San Francisco, where she taught science at an elementary school and then began medical school at UCSF. As a condition to her move, she made him commit to one date night a week and 100 uninterrupted minutes away from Facebook. He was then growing Facebook at warp speed\u2014he\u2019d turned down an offer from Yahoo to purchase it for $1 billion, and now, after an investment from Microsoft of $240 million, the company was valued at $15 billion. Chan told The New Yorker,<\/em> \u201cI had to realize early on that I was not going to change who Mark was.\u201d But she could try to guide him in a world of real-life humans. They spent weekends together doing earnest activities like watching their favorite show, The West Wing<\/em> (created by Aaron Sorkin, who would go on to write the screenplay for The Social Network<\/em>),<\/em> and playing Settlers of Catan, and in 2010 she moved in.<\/p>\n By that point, roughly one out of every 12 people across the globe had a Facebook account. Its promise was epic\u2014to do nothing short of connect the entire world, and to help people \u201cmaintain empathy for each other,\u201d as he told Time<\/em> magazine, where he was named Person of the Year at age 26. In line with his status, Zuckerberg began honing his legacy. His hero had been fellow tech billionaire Bill Gates, who in 2010 launched the Giving Pledge, challenging other billionaires to promise to give away at least half of their fortunes before death. \u201cI encouraged them to start early,\u201d Gates says of early conversations with both Zuckerberg and Chan about philanthropy, noting that \u201cPriscilla is leading one of the most ambitious scientific and philanthropic organizations in a generation.\u201d Taking his cue, Zuckerberg announced with fanfare on The Oprah Winfrey Show<\/em> that he would be donating $100 million to Newark public schools. The results of that effort were mixed, which educators have attributed to the project\u2019s insufficient collaboration with the community. (A CZI spokesperson disputes the criticism, pointing to independent research that found improvement in graduation rates and gains in student achievement.)<\/p>\n Chan later told him that if he was going to be serious about education, he should probably have some real-life experience teaching. At her urging, he gave it a whirl by teaching a class on entrepreneurship at a Boys and Girls Club. Meanwhile, Chan was all in, doing high-stakes trauma work at San Francisco General Hospital. \u201cIt was gunshot wound after gunshot wound,\u201d recalls a close friend. \u201cShe was the friend who\u2019s always exhausted after doing a double shift.\u201d She also took part in a special UCSF program designed to improve the health of underserved children. Facebook went public on May 18, 2012. Chan and Zuckerberg, now worth an estimated $19 billion, married the next day.<\/p>\n In 2015 the couple began two major projects, which they made a point of connecting: CZI and their family. After multiple miscarriages, Chan was pregnant with their first child. According to the recent memoir Careless People<\/em> by former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams (whom Meta has legally blocked from personally promoting the book on the basis that she has potentially violated her contract), while Zuckerberg and his team were in Indonesia, he floated the idea to his coworkers that he might not be present for the birth\u2014not that there was any particular conflict, just that something more important might come up at work. He relayed that he\u2019d spoken with Chan about the possibility. As Wynn-Williams claimed, \u201c[Chan] told Mark that she<\/em> would be totally fine with him skipping the delivery but that he might come to regret missing the birth of his first child.\u201d (\u201cMark was, of course, present from the beginning to the end of all three hospitalizations and deliveries for all three of their children,\u201d says a source close to the couple. \u201cThis was not something they discussed.\u201d) A few months before the birth, in September 2015, Zuckerberg attended a White House dinner and spoke with President Xi Jinping of China, where he was desperate to launch Facebook. Wynn-Williams claimed that he asked if Xi would do him the honor of naming his unborn child. Xi declined. They ended up naming the baby Maxima\u2014\u201cMax.\u201d Zuckerberg had long been fixated by the Roman emperors and would go on to name their other two daughters August and Aurelia. (Careless People<\/em> \u201cis a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,\u201d a Meta spokesperson said upon the book\u2019s publication.)<\/p>\n Max\u2019s birth coincided with the unveiling of CZI, which shook the philanthropy world. At its founding, the couple wrote a public letter to their new baby that both spoke of the promise of science and was suffused with Obama-era feel-good progressivism. \u201cOur hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality,\u201d they wrote. \u201cPromoting equality is about making sure everyone has access to these opportunities\u2014regardless of nation, families, or circumstances they are born into.\u201d They announced they would be giving away 99 percent of their shares in Facebook in their lifetime, then valued at $45 billion, to the organization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n