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Mark Zuckerberg is following a path paved by fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet: laundering his untold billions through a health research prestige project.
Called the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub — his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, is also involved — the foundation’s stated long-term mission is to “cure and prevent all disease through AI-powered biology, frontier research, and state-of-the-art technology.”
True to those enormous goals, the Biohub recently announced a $500 million investment into AI models of human cells, specifically, in order to “accelerate the cure and prevention of all diseases,” Euronews reported.
The half a billion dollars are said to go toward a five-year plan to create predictive models of human cells. Once those are built, they will supposedly help medical researchers and biologists understand how cells interact at the level of an entire organism. In theory, this would unlock incredible advancements in bioscience — perhaps even making the deadly diseases plaguing humanity a thing of the past, in the project’s outsize wording.
In brass tacks, $400 million of the funding will go to Biohub’s own AI development, while the rest will go to miscellaneous third-party researchers.
“To build artificial intelligence that can accurately represent the full complexity of biology and accelerate scientific research, we need orders of magnitude more data than exists today,” Biohub’s head of science Alex Rives said in an announcement. “We need new technologies to observe the cell, from the molecular to the tissue level, and in the context of health and disease.”
The new campaign comes as Zuckerberg’s Meta paid the lowest federal income tax rate on record, just a little over 3.5 percent of its total revenue in 2025, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That came even as the company had its best year ever, bringing in $79 billion in profits across 2025.
Given that the federal corporate tax rate is 21 percent, there’s a major discrepancy: $13.7 billion, to be exact. That’s an astonishing amount of money that could have gone to the type of medical research Zuckerberg is now throwing a small fraction of that at — or, heck, federal health insurance programs or the government’s Food and Nutrition Service, which provides nutrition support to millions of low-income Americans.
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