Zuckerberg school closures reflect wider shift among US billionaires

The school, heavily reliant on this financial backing, was forced to announce its closure shortly thereafter.

But this ostensibly sudden move by one of the wealthiest couples on the planet represents a broader ideological shift among America’s ultra-rich.

Where the last decade saw Silicon Valley billionaires pouring money into socially progressive causes – from criminal justice reform to public health and education – recent years have marked a conspicuous retreat.

With Donald Trump’s resurgence as a dominant political force, many corporate leaders and tech moguls are recalibrating their alliances. Zuckerberg has made increasingly conciliatory moves toward the Trump camp, mirroring a broader pattern of Silicon Valley seeking detente with the populist right.

In this sense, The Primary School’s closure reflects the fading appetite for philanthropy aimed at rectifying structural inequality. Instead, billionaire donors are redirecting resources toward “safer” ventures: climate tech, AI ethics, or biomedical research. These are all arenas less likely to antagonize conservative power brokers and less directly tied to systemic socio-political critique.

There is, too, the undeniable tension between venture-capitalist logic and the slow, messy reality of social change. Education reform is a generational project; it does not yield quarterly returns. But Silicon Valley’s philanthropic model increasingly mirrors its investment strategies – results-driven and impatient with failure.

Across the West, billionaires are reevaluating their commitments to social programs that are difficult to scale, resistant to rapid optimization, and burdened by the complex legacies of racism, class inequality, and generational poverty.

Given the fact that the world’s richest are ultimately the planet’s most powerful – and thus the very same individuals who have real impact when it comes to these seemingly insurmountable social issues – this is a dire reality.

As always, it’s The Primary School’s families (disproportionately Black, Latino, and immigrant) who bear the consequences of such a shift.

For many parents, this institution was the only place where their children received comprehensive medical care alongside their education.

If those with the most resources cannot sustain a relatively small institution serving 400 children, one they themselves designed, what does that signal for larger-scale efforts to address inequality?

As the backlash continues to mount online and in the press, the collapse of The Primary School has become a case study not only in the fragility of private-sector solutions to public problems, but also in the broader retreat of American billionaires from the messy business of real, equitable social change.