Facebook CEO and fifth richest person in the world, Mark Zuckerberg has said he “understands” where Bernie Sanders is coming from when the Democratic presidential candidate says billionaires shouldn’t exist.
During a town hall event at Facebook’s headquarters on Thursday in response to an employee question about Sanders’ comments, he said, “I don’t know if I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have, but on some level no one deserves to have that much money.”
Zuckerberg currently has a net worth of nearly $70 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He has previously pledged to give away 99% of his Facebook shares.
“I think if you do something that’s good, you get rewarded, but I do think some of the wealth that can be accumulated is unreasonable,” he said at the event.
In an unusual move, Zuckerberg decided to livestream the company event after audio from internal meetings conducted in July was leaked and published earlier this week. (He said that the company believes an intern shared the audio recording.)
“Our internal Q&As at Facebook are one of my favorite traditions, and after the transcript of one of them was published online earlier this week, I thought it would be good to show everyone what these Q&As are like,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his personal Facebook page on Thursday minutes before a broadcast of the town hall event began.
In the leaked audio, obtained by tech site The Verge, Zuckerberg comments on another presidential candidate — Sen. Elizabeth Warren — and admits to employees that the prospect of her as president could “suck” for Facebook, given her promises to break up tech companies but assured that although it will lead to a legal challenge, the tech companies going to win.
