In the summer of 2020, Priscilla Chan faced the employees of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with tears in her eyes. Black Lives Matter protests were raging across the country, and Chan — the cofounder of CZI and wife of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — had decided to shift the focus of their biweekly all-hands meeting to address it.
“It didn’t feel right to not spend the time as an organization acknowledging the — in medicine, we’d call it ‘acute on chronic’ racial disaster that is our country right now,” said Chan, a trained pediatrician, according to video of the meeting obtained by The Standard. Her voice shook as she continued: “I know there’s more progress to be made. We are not perfect. Our work is not perfect. But we stand with the Black community.”
Four and a half years later, Chan was again compelled to tearily address her employees. This time, the subject was her and Zuckerberg’s attendance at Donald Trump’s second inauguration. In this meeting, according to an attendee, Chan suggested that the team stay optimistic about Trump’s presidency, that they wait and see what would happen. At one point, according to messages between CZI employees who were present, Chan’s eyes welled as she described witnessing the “peaceful transfer of power” and conveying that moment to her immigrant parents.
“She completely did not acknowledge the fact that there literally was an insurrection four years before,” said one of the people present. “People were like, ‘What the ef is happening?’”
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a $6 billion behemoth in the world of philanthropy, was once seen as a largely progressive organization, championing causes like immigration and criminal justice reform and declaring its commitment to creating “a future for everyone that is more just, inclusive, and full of opportunity.”
But in the months since Chan and Zuckerberg sat courtside at the U.S. Capitol, CZI has undergone sweeping changes, eliminating its internal diversity, equity, and inclusion teams, reportedly pulling funding for a school for low-income children in East Palo Alto, and declaring an end to all of its advocacy work.
The changes have prompted questions from staffers about how CZI could so quickly and dramatically abandon its ideals, and severe recriminations from the nonprofits and school communities that depended on its funding.
But people connected to CZI say this kind of capitulation to the politics of the day was baked into its very foundation.
In interviews with a dozen current and former staffers and researchers, a picture has emerged of an organization that has long struggled to separate itself from the shadow of its billionaire co-founder and the company he runs; an outwardly ambitious philanthropy that is inwardly terrified of causing headaches for its founders; a multibillion-dollar apparatus trained on controlling communications and avoiding risk as much as distributing charity.
In a statement, a spokesperson for CZI said the organization had “made significant investments in science, technology, and education. We have not shied away from tackling the most consequential challenges, regardless of politics.”
“We have been clear from the beginning that CZI and Meta are separate organizations and operate independently of each other,” the spokesperson added. “CZI’s programmatic decisions are guided by where we believe we can have the greatest impact.”
While outsiders have reacted in shock to Zuckerberg and Chan’s embrace of the second Trump presidency, even as it attacked the same causes they once championed, many current and former staffers are not surprised.
“Mark and Priscilla were always going to follow the winds,” said Raymond Holgado, an early employee in CZI’s Justice and Opportunity department, who later filed a racial discrimination complaint against the organization. (A spokesperson said Holgado’s claims had been “independently investigated, and found to be unsubstantiated.”)
“Whatever was politically expedient and wasn’t going to upset the business interests of Facebook was where they were going to land,” Holgado said.
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Chan and Zuckerberg founded CZI in 2015, in the fading glow of the Obama administration, announcing its arrival in an open letter coinciding with the birth of their first child. Following a trend among billionaires at the time, the couple pledged to give 99% of their personal wealth to the philanthropy, laying out three bold goals: advancing medicine, improving education, and promoting equality.
While the couple took on the titles of co-CEOs, Chan served as CZI’s de facto head, working from its offices nearly every day while Zuckerberg dealt with the operations of Facebook. She sat for several glowing media profiles, all of which highlighted her working-class upbringing as the child of Vietnamese refugees outside Boston.
Chan cited her underprivileged youth as her motivation for this work, while Zuckerberg pointed to it as his inspiration. “Priscilla’s family story is amazing, it’s an inspiring thing for all of us,” he told a Quartz reporter in 2018. “You see what’s possible when people have opportunity and you level the playing field.”
Former employees said they were drawn in by the couple’s bold promises, along with the high salaries and the ability to work with luminaries in their fields. One early staffer, who previously worked for the Obama campaign, said she was entranced by the group’s promises to chart a better course for billionaire philanthropy.
“The idea at the time was, ‘Yo, these guys want to do philanthropy differently. They want to do it right. They are handing the reins over,’” she said. “We were gonna be the good guys.”
But employees say they quickly learned that despite the organization’s bold aims, it imposed significant constraints. First and foremost, CZI’s leadership was concerned with avoiding any headlines that could reflect badly on Zuckerberg and, by extension, on Facebook.
Three former employees described a uniquely empowered communications department at CZI, which controlled everything from what words employees could use to describe their work — “social and emotional learning,” for instance, was vetoed after it became a bogeyman of the far right — to which grants could be distributed.
One former employee recalled an education grant that was killed because it could have been construed as supporting a politically divisive issue at the time.
“Looking back on it, if a foundation that wasn’t connected to Mark Zuckerberg did this, it could probably go under the radar,” the former employee said of the grant. “But if we made this grant, it would look like Mark Zuckerberg supports this issue — or at least that’s the narrative that would have spread.”
For similar reasons, staffers said, the organization was intensely focused on appearing bipartisan. Two former employees recalled frequent tension around ensuring that too much money did not go to liberal organizations versus conservative ones.
Holgado recalled being asked to create a chart of every criminal justice group that CZI funded, to determine whether they leaned progressive or conservative.
“It was a big-tent approach to these issues from the very beginning,” Holgado said. “We had to make sure we didn’t fund too many progressive organizations, because we didn’t want to offend the conservative base.”
A spokesperson said that CZI has “always been nonpartisan. Our work is driven by our mission, and we have engaged leaders, advisors, and partners and supported efforts from across the political spectrum.”
Of the comms department’s power, she added: “Communications is a strategic function whose work is wholly in service of our programmatic goals. Final decisions about programmatic grants are made by the respective leaders of our initiatives in alignment with strategy.”
‘The idea at the time was, ‘Yo, these guys want to do philanthropy differently. They want to do it right. They are handing the reins over … We were gonna be the good guys.’
former CZI staffer
Despite these efforts, CZI soon learned that steering clear of controversy would be impossible for an organization comanaged by one of the world’s most controversial men. In 2018, Summit Learning, an online learning platform in which CZI had made one of its first investments, became a national lightning rod — in no small part because of its connections to Zuckerberg. Parents protested the school system’s signing away of their children’s data to Facebook. Students in Brooklyn marched in the streets, decrying their “screen-based learning.”
One former CZI employee said she was hired as an education advocacy strategist, only to find that her real job would be diffusing tension around the Summit situation.
“People were like, ‘This program is problematic. We can’t have Mark Zuckerberg opening up charter schools,’” this person recalled. “There was a lot of pushback, and it turned out [CZI] actually wanted me there to figure out how to make parents not angry about the Summit Learning program.” (A spokesperson said the Summit Learning Program supports existing schools but does not open new ones. Districts using the program have seen the “positive impact of the program.”)
Today, Chan and Zuckerberg have significantly scaled back their educational ambitions. In August 2023, CZI laid off dozens of staff in its education department and announced it would no longer fund education policy, shifting its focus from advocacy and grant-making to product development. In a blog post at the time, head of education Sandra Liu Huang called the changes “humbling” and “challenging,” but “ultimately necessary.”
One former employee said she thought fear of controversy was why CZI ultimately spun off the vast majority of its social advocacy work. “I think it became increasingly difficult for Mark and Priscilla, or anything CZI related, or anything connected to them, to be involved in anything political and have it not become about them,” she said.
The employee specifically recalled working on a housing campaign to which CZI donated heavily, and which quickly devolved to mud-slinging. “The campaign became about Mark,” she said. “The opposition ran ads being like, ‘Mark Zuckerberg is coming after your house.'”
Still, this employee took a slightly more charitable view than others, suggesting Chan and Zuckerberg steered clear of controversy not because they feared how negative headlines would affect them, but how it would effect their work.
“We really tried to do the work as best we could, so that the story wasn’t about us,” she said. “Not because they cared about the story being about them, but because it just wasn’t helping the work.”
The summer that Chan tearfully addressed her employees via Zoom marked a turning point for CZI. With the pandemic and Black Lives Matter demonstrations roiling the country, Chan found herself in the unenviable position of avowing her commitment to racial justice while also defending Facebook’s decision to let the president spew false and violence-inciting messages online.
At a second staff meeting that summer, Chan all but pleaded with CZI employees not to conflate her work with her husband’s company, as seen in a video obtained by The Standard.
“For the comms folks who’ve been around a long time, one of the early comms goals was for CZI to be called CZI, and for me to be called by name, rather than, ‘comma wife,’” she said, of the media’s tendency to identify her only in relation to her husband. “I think we should be defining ourselves by who we are in the work that we stand for and the values that we believe in.”
In spite of these emotional entreaties, the biweekly all-hands had grown tense, former staffers say, with employees pushing Chan and Zuckerberg to address CZI’s policies around racial equity. If the co-founders were afraid of what CZI would do to Facebook’s reputation, staffers said, Facebook was now impinging on CZI’s: During a meeting, at least one employee complained that some nonprofits no longer wanted to work with them because of the social media company’s recent policy decisions.
For a while, it seemed as if the pressure had worked: CZI hired a head of DEI, and at the end of 2020, Chan and Zuckerberg announced that they would donate $500 million to support racial justice efforts. Racial equity “cannot be a siloed goal,” they wrote in their public, end-of-year letter. “We will lead with humility and ensure that Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color have a stake in CZI’s initiatives and a voice in guiding them — shaping our work, challenging our assumptions, and improving the way we operate.”
But if it felt like a victory for CZI staffers, it would be short-lived. Within months, Zuckerberg was attracting scathing criticism from the right for his decision to ban Trump from Facebook after the Jan. 6 insurrection, and for his and Chan’s $400 million donation to bolster election offices in 2020. Previously a punching bag of the left, Facebook now received the same treatment from the right: Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado compared the company to “Communist China” for banning Trump, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called for an anti-trust investigation.
Multiple CZI staffers said they felt this period of intense pressure pushed Chan and Zuckerberg to shift their political stance.
“I think that sufficiently set the tone for, ‘The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. We don’t particularly want to be doing this work anyway, we’re not values-aligned with it, and now we’re getting bad publicity,’” Holgado said of efforts surrounding racial justice and DEI. “I think ever since then, they’ve been marching steadily toward aligning their vision to where it is now.”
A spokesperson disputed these assertions, stating that CZI has “always been nonpartisan, this is not an evolution, and it’s reflected in CZI’s mission, approach to the work, our partners and staff.”
Still, in 2021, CZI spun off its long-running “justice and opportunity” work entirely, forming a separate 501(c)(4) called The Just Trust to work on criminal justice reform. CZI initially seeded the organization with $350 million in startup capital but appears to no longer fund the group, per an editor’s note recently added to the original press release.
In the years following, the education team would also see significant changes, including budget cuts and layoffs of roughly 30% of its staff. Around 2021, a former staffer said, “our comms team really started to say, ‘You can’t say [social and emotional learning], you can’t say DEI,’ and started backgrounding racial ideas in the work, because they didn’t want it to become a lightning rod in the media.”
In 2024, CZI officially marked the transition many staffers had seen coming, branding itself a “science-first philanthropy” in an email to employees. Chan herself penned the note, writing that “science is where our biggest investments and bets have been and will be made moving forward,” and announcing the promotion of Marc Malandro, the former VP of operations for science, to the number two role at CZI.
Looking back on the time since 2020, a former employee remarked: “I would have never predicted the level of pendulum swinging to focus on DEI, but then also immediately bouncing back to not focus on DEI thereafter.”
He added: “It feels like they’ve always been trying to run away from that kind of work over the last several years.”
Around Trump’s second inauguration in January, after Meta donated $1 million to the inaugural fund, CZI staffers subjected Zuckerberg to a particularly intense round of questioning, with one asking how trans employees were supposed to feel about him donating to an administration opposed to their rights. Zuckerberg responded by saying that Meta and CZI are “obviously two different organizations. So Meta is going to do its thing. CZI will do its own thing.” Remarked one staffer present: “It was not sympathetic at all. I thought it was a very cold response.”
In the weeks following the inauguration, Meta slashed its DEI teams and made drastic changes to its content moderation, getting rid of fact-checkers and loosening its restrictions on hate speech. CZI leadership promised staffers that similar changes were not in store for the philanthropy, but weeks later, its DEI teams were gone, too. In a letter posted to the CZI website in February, COO Malandro announced an end to all its social advocacy funding, including work on racial equity and immigration reform.
CZI has explained these changes as part of its shift in focus toward science, but internally, staffers say, leaders expressed fear of retribution from the Trump administration. The Standard previously reported that general counsel Mark Kim spoke to staff about CZI’s shift away from DEI and community work at a meeting in March, explaining that CZI was a political target because of Meta and Zuckerberg’s high profile. According to one former employee, the internal line from leadership was, “We’re doing what we have to to avoid being sued.”
“There was never any, ‘We are going to stand up for what we believe in’ or, ‘We’re going to take a principled stance,’’’ another recently departed staffer said. “It was not the reaction that I would have guessed a large philanthropy would have.”
On top of the nonprofits and researchers that lost funding due to the changes, CZI also reportedly cut funding to The Primary School, the free private school it operated in East Palo Alto. The organization pledged $50 million to continue services and help students find new schools after the 2025-26 school year, but devastated parents said they worried about finding suitable accommodations in the notoriously underfunded Ravenswood school district.
Current and former CZI staffers said they were stunned by the closure of The Primary School, which they described as a personal passion of Chan’s. The former pediatrician had seemed genuinely excited about the school’s commitment to providing education and healthcare in a single location, and for a time served as the school’s CEO. One former CZI grant manager couldn’t believe Chan had parted ways with the school. “A lot of the grant making I’d done, I’m not surprised it’s being sunsetted,” the person said. “But genuinely, when I saw the news about The Primary School, I was confused and shocked.”
Staffers said the past few years have made them reconsider their perception of Chan, whom employees generally looked upon more favorably than Zuckerberg in the early days of the philanthropy. Former employees described Chan as a hardworking, down-to-earth figure who came to the office nearly every day, often in sweatpants. Staffers said they viewed her as being in a “gilded cage,” attempting to do good work but hamstrung by ties to her husband’s company.
Perhaps that’s why some staffers seemed almost personally disappointed by what they saw as her shortcomings: The tendency to cry when things got tough, they said, dissuaded further conversation around sensitive issues like racial discrimination. One former staffer was frustrated when Chan intimated that CZI would not have layoffs in 2023, then seemed to change her tune after Meta enacted similar cuts. (A spokesperson said she made no such promises.) Said one former staffer of the recent DEI changes: “I’m assuming her hands were tied because of the connection to Meta … But I lost that inspiration that I [once] derived from her.”
A CZI spokesperson responded: “Priscilla leads our organization with optimism and urgency to make an impact.”
Employees are doubtful about how long Chan will stay at the helm of the organization she once saw as her legacy. Two staffers present for the recent changes described COO Malandro and general counsel Kim as newly empowered, with Kim making program decisions despite never having worked at a philanthropy before.
Last month, CZI hired its first-ever president, sparking rumors that Chan and Zuckerberg are preparing to step down as co-CEOs. Tellingly, the new president, Lori Goler, spent the last 16 years as vice president of human resources at Meta.
A spokesperson said that rumors of Priscilla’s departure were “not accurate, and Kim and Malandro are long-standing CZI leaders.”
‘I can tell you for sure the morale of the people working at CZI was down. They also didn’t want to implement these changes and felt like it was basically going against the mission they’d built over the last few years.’
Jason Shepherd, CZI funding recipient
Throughout these changes, Chan has continued posting cheerily on social media about CZI’s science work, heralding the launch of four scientific “grand challenges” around imaging, inflammation monitoring, harnessing the immune system, and virtual cell modeling.
But even employees in the science department are nervous about how Trump’s cuts to National Institutes of Health funding will affect their work. Emails obtained by The Standard show CZI canceled at least one science grant focused on expanding diversity in the field this year.
Jason Shepherd, a professor at the University of Utah and an organizer of a 2020 open letter from scientists to Zuckerberg, said there was a dark cloud over a recent meeting of CZI program officers and scientists who receive their funding.
“I can tell you for sure the morale of the people working at CZI was down,” he said. “They also didn’t want to implement these changes and felt like it was basically going against the mission they’d built over the last few years.”
He added: “They felt like there wasn’t much they could do about it.”
Ten years into CZI’s existence, its website is scrubbed of many of the grand promises made at its initiation. Gone is the tagline of “advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity,” replaced by a generic commitment to “help solve some of society’s toughest challenges.” Sections on DEI efforts, added during the pandemic, have been removed, as have pages on housing affordability and economic inclusion. CZI has maintained its commitment to giving locally — for example, to small nonprofits in San Mateo — but some of these organizations previously told The Standard they are no longer eligible for funding due to their focus on helping specific demographic groups, such as Latinos.
Reflecting on the past 10 years, an early CZI employee said she felt the organization had approached its work somewhat over-optimistically in the beginning. The team had not expected that pursuing such grand goals — as such controversial public figures — would create so much friction, she said. By the time they learned how difficult it would be, she said, “We were already in really deep into a lot of [these issues]. And reversing course or pivoting is deeply painful when you’re already in it.”
Some former employees expressed reticence to critique CZI, noting the good work it had done over the years. Others said they felt that work had always been undermined by the organization’s ties to Meta, and this was the inevitable conclusion.
“A lot of what I came away with was, you can’t serve two masters,” Holgado said. “You can’t be the CEO and the face of Meta and also say that your other work is going to be distinct.”
Another former staffer said the experience of working at CZI had turned her off of billionaire-funded philanthropy altogether, after witnessing how vulnerable it was to its founders whims.
“These guys go through some phase where this is what they think is cool right now, and that’s where [Zuckerberg] was when I was at CZI,” she said. “Then at some point, he went on Joe Rogan, became best friends … with Trump, and decided, ‘Oh, no, never mind. This isn’t cool anymore. Now you can go on Facebook and say homosexuality is a mental illness.”
“When I saw him going in this direction, I was like, ‘OK, this philanthropy is going to fall apart,’” she added. “So the idea that they woke up one day and were like, ‘Never mind,’ does not surprise me at all.”
Additional reporting by Kali Hays