It’s an unfortunate thing that the fiery collapse of the crypto exchange FTX is giving many people their first look at one of the most promising charitable movements of the last decade. It’s called effective altruism, or EA, and in recent years, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, has arguably been the most famous — or maybe just the richest — effective altruist in the world.
That Bankman-Fried is now hiding in the Bahamas as charges of deception, fraud and outright theft pile up, many are speculating that he’s going to take the movement down with him. New York Magazine writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood wonders if EA is now “defective.” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, joked on Twitter that it’s “over.” And Vox journalist Kelsey Piper’s interview with SBF suggests that all his charitable work was ultimately just a scam.
But here’s the problem with that speculation. Bankman-Fried is not an effective altruist.
