Mark Zuckerberg isn't the only one who's had a big week. On Monday, Priscilla Chan, the longtime partner of the 28-year-old Facebook founder-earned her medical degree from the top institution in the country, just days after inspiring a revolution in organ donor access. Also: her boyfriend just turned his first job into $19 billion dollars. Am I forgetting anything? Yes:They got married.
On Saturday, a small group of friends and family expecting to attend a party for Chan's graduation were surprised by an impromptu wedding in the backyard of their $7 million Palo Alto home. The couple had been secretly planning the event for months, on top of all the other projects on their plates. Zuckerberg even found time to design the ruby ring for his bride.
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So far it's been a good month for Priscilla, the Harvard alum who met Zuckerberg at a campus frat party almost a decade ago. On May 14, while the tech world marked Zuckerberg's 28th birthday, Chan was picking up her degree from UCSF's School of Medicine, and even icing her degree with membership into the exclusive National Medical Honor Society.
While her new husband's expertise seems to be in working the market into a frenzy, Chan's specialty is in pediatrics. Already, her medical experience is saving lives on a large scale. Earlier this month, Facebook launched a new feature allowing users to add their organ donation status to their profiles. Zuckerberg credits the idea to Chan. "She's going to be a pediatrician, so our dinner conversations are often about Facebook and the kids that she's meeting," Zuckerberg told ABC News. After a few particularly heart-rending accounts of children in need of organ transplants at her hospital, Facebook's C.E.O developed the donor tool and effectively enlisted over a thousand new donors in a matter of days, according to Donor Life.
Photos: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan on vacation together
It was a shift for Zuckerberg's brand, more often linked to lawsuits and financial speculation than saving lives. But 'Cilla,' as her boyfriend calls her, is in many ways Facebook's better half. The woman not so much behind the man, but running parallel, with equally bold strides. It's a new improved model for the so-called billionaire's wife.
After the couple made their union truly official by changing their status to "married" on Facebook, financial pundits were already speculating on a pre-nup. The Daily Telegraph's Rosa Prince noted the timing of the wedding may not qualify Chan for her husband's IPO earnings, according to California law.
If you ask Donald Trump, and unfortunately someone at CNBC's Squawk Box did, Chan would walk away with a chunk of change in the event of a pre-nup free divorce (that's jumping the gun a little, no?)
If they divorced, says Trump, "she hits the jackpot like nobody...I could see the lawyers and the lawsuit right now. Without her brilliant decision-making, he would have never come through. She advised him, she made dinner for him, she's entitled to at least $10 billion."
This is all assuming that Chan even wants her new husband's assets in the event of a divorce. Not everyone thinks, or dates, like Trump. For now, it seems Chan's big concern is saving the lives of kids, and that's probably one reason why her unfathomably rich husband loves her. As the world stares slack-jawed at Zuckerberg's accomplishments, he's doing the same with his new wife.
After Priscilla earned her degree Monday, Mark posted the following message for her on Facebook.
I'm so proud of you, Dr. Chan : )
Yes, that's a billion dollar emoticon smile.
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