Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘starting to plant the seeds’ to step down…. Aspires to follow in Gates’ footsteps

When Amazon (AMZN) Chairman Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO earlier this month and wasted no time launching into space, some may have wondered when Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg would step down from the tech giant he founded.

In fact, Zuckerberg is already starting to prepare for his own exit, says Cecilia Kang, a New York Times technology reporter and co-author of a new insider account of Facebook called, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination."

Kang, whose book draws on interviews with 400 people in and around Facebook, told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview that Zuckerberg aspires to follow the path to philanthropy tread by former Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Bill Gates, whom Zuckerberg considers a mentor. But the current array of challenges at Facebook will make it difficult for Zuckerberg to leave "anytime soon," Kang says.

"We're seeing him start to plant the seeds," she says. "We've got that idea from talking to people who talked to Mark directly about his real ambitions to emulate sort of the path that Bill Gates took.

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