Mark Zuckerberg says no one deserves to be a billionaire

Mark Zuckerberg, US tech entrepreneur and CEO of Facebook, says he doesn’t think billionaires should exist, adding that in reality, “no-one deserves to have that much money”. 

The fifth richest person in the world with billions of dollars to his name, spoke on Thursday during a weekly business conference at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Zuckerberg was speaking in response to a worker who asked for his view on a statement by Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate, that “billionaires shouldn’t exist.”

“I understand where he’s coming from,” Zuckerberg 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.”

“I think that if you do something that is good, you should get rewarded. But I do think that some of the wealth that can be accumulated is unreasonable.

During a livestreamed question-and-answer session with employees on Thursday, the 35-year-old billionaire, who has a net worth of nearly $70 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, spoke on a range of topics including the types of fake news Facebook tries to prevent.

“When we talk about misinformation, a lot of people focus on a statement that isn’t clear if it’s a shade of true or partially false,” he said.

“There’s a lot of stuff that people say that is completely false. That’s the thing that I’m really focused on and making sure that we [stop].”