"People don’t have paychecks, which means they can’t buy food"

“People don’t have paychecks, which means they can’t buy food,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s billionaire chief operating officer. “I think people really are starting to think not just about the immediate health issues, but also the very immediate kind of critical needs and issues that this represents.”

To offer help to those affected by the coronavirus or the economic downturn, Sandberg and her her fiancé Tom Bernthal have raised a $7 million emergency fund for a food bank in Silicon Valley. She and Bernthal gave an initial $1 million then raised the rest from other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and billionaires like Workday’s Aneel Bhusri, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Intuit’s Scott Cook.

“You know, this may be one of the defining moments of our lifetime, could be a defining moment in a century,” Sandberg tells Forbes’ Hayley Cuccinello. “But I have to believe that if that happens and as that happens, people are going to step up to equal the challenge in front of us.”