A new Facebook hoax has recently emerged. A post being circulated indicates that company CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving away part of his fortune to Facebook members.
To register to win a portion of the billions of dollars being awarded, members simply have to share the post and tag their friends.
The post reads, "Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he is giving away $45 billion of Facebook stock. What you may not have heard is that he plans to give 10 percent of it away to people like YOU and ME! All you have to do is copy and paste this message into a post IMMEDIATELY and tag 5-10 of your friends. At midnight PST, Facebook will search through the day's posts and award 1000 people with $4.5 million EACH as a way of saying thank you for making Facebook such a powerful vehicle for connection and philanthropy."
Unfortunately, the contents of the post are too good to be true. It's a hoax, and has been circulating ever since Zuckerberg made a bona fide announcement about giving away a large portion of his wealth upon the birth of his daughter with his wife Priscilla Chan.
Zuckerberg and Chan wrote an open letter in which they promised to start a charitable initiative to support positive causes. They then promised to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares to the trust, leaving them with only 1 percent to keep for themselves.
Given the total value of the couple's stake in Facebook is approximately $46 billion, "only" 1 percent still comes to a whopping $460 million. In addition, the couple will hold onto whatever private wealth they currently hold and will accumulate in the future.
Facebook responded to the hoax by cautioning subscribers that they shouldn't believe everything they see on the Web. "While Priscilla and Mark's pledge to give money to improve the world is real, not everything you read on the Internet is, and they're not giving it away randomly," the company stated.
