Give Mark Zuckerberg a break — people were just as skeptical of Bill Gates when he became a philanthropist

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Last week, Mark Zuckerberg made an impressive announcement: he plans to give 99% of his Facebook shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a newly-created LLC that will give away and invest money in projects that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan believe in.

There were, of course, endless hot takes debating his decision to disperse the shares through an LLC (which allows Zuckerberg to invest in private companies instead of just giving to charity) and his desire to give money to digital initiatives (he thinks he can solve all the world's problems through software, critics say, and his support of initiatives like Internet.org only serve to connect more people to Facebook), among other things.

Zuckerberg's plan may still be rough around the edges. But it's worth noting that plenty of criticisms were lobbed at Bill Gates before he became one of the world's most beloved philanthropists. 

Back when Gates was still a young man with billions of dollars to burn, he was seen as Microsoft's "alpha ingrate, balking at sharing his billions until he was older," according to a New York Times article from 1997. 

That same year, Gates announced a plan to give $200 million towards connecting libraries to the internet across the U.S. This was met with skepticism, as the New York Times points out: "The upstart geekocracy of high technology is not known for sharing, and grateful-but-skeptical Seattleites often point out the strings attached to gifts: Mr. Gates's library plan will help promote use of Microsoft software." 

Gates was also criticized early on for giving money "to already loaded institutions like Harvard," as Newsweek pointed out in 1999. 

Nearly two decades after the William H. Gates Foundation was born — and 15 years after it was renamed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — it's more than apparent that Gates is an effective philanthropist. He's learned through years of on-the-ground work that low-tech solutions can sometimes be just as effective as flashier ones, and that small-scale initiatives can yield big results. 

Zuckerberg has certainly made mistakes in his giving (see: the debacle surrounding his $100 million donation to Newark's public schools). But it will be years before we know if Zuckerberg's latest round of philanthropy is effective. We just have to give it time.

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