Almost exactly a year ago, Vox journalist Kelsey Piper was having a heart-to-heart with Sam Bankman-Fried. The “Crypto King” (people used to call him a lot of stupid things) had just declared bankruptcy, setting off a chain of events that last week ended in his conviction for multiple types of fraud. He has yet to be sentenced, but he faces a maximum term of 115 years, which is quite some override of the principle “avoid sending rich people to prison” laid down, I believe, by the founding fathers.
Against a backdrop in which Bankman-Fried has already been put bang to rights, and on the understanding that further critique of the young gentleman won’t give anyone their money back, I still can’t help circling one part of the Piper/Bankman-Fried exchange. “You don’t believe anyone is doing anything for good reasons,” Piper told him in a message. “You don’t believe the ‘good guys’ are good, so why not make it big and then be the one who gets to decide what ‘good’ is?”
They were discussing the regulation of crypto, after Bankman-Fried’s pithy conclusion: “Fuck regulators.” But it could just as well describe the relationship between billionaires, in tech particularly, and philanthropy. They say they are doing good; they often claim generosity as their abiding or only motivation; they may even believe it – it’s just unfortunate that they’ve already anointed themselves the only person who truly understands what “good” means.
Bankman-Fried, a self-styled “effective altruist”, had a nerdy, ascetic self-fashioning – he once told a journalist that his ultimate goal was to give all his money away, following up, as if in proof of that proposition, that all the clothes he owned could fit into one rucksack. And he did make political donations, becoming the second-largest individual donor to Joe Biden’s campaign, after Mike Bloomberg, in the 2020 cycle, and reportedly toying with the idea of paying Donald Trump not to run again in 2024. Trump’s team allegedly put a price tag of $5bn on that.
“Toy” was the word: Bankman-Fried was treating democracy like a game whose players could be bought, sold, shut down, amped up, a final ballot delivered to voters that had been prescreened by a billionaire – but nobody worry, because he knew what “good” was. He also spent a lot of money on vanity projects (renaming the Miami Arena FTX, after his crypto platform), luxury (a $40m Bahamian mansion), parties that would attract celebrities … and while the courts are understandably preoccupied with the fact that this wasn’t his money to splurge in the first place, the rest of us should be worried even if it had been. This version of philanthropy, which allows no scrutiny or pluralism, which coexists with profligacy and self-enrichment, but that doesn’t matter, because Professor Big Wallet knows best, is worse than unhelpful. It rarely delivers what it claims, it sucks the life out of meaningful collective action, it provides a smokescreen for the propagation of untold social harm and it’s nauseating to watch.
The billionaire philanthropist doesn’t necessarily have to sign up to democracy – he might have his own, superior definition of what the common good looks like. Peter Thiel (co-founder of Paypal), for one, thinks freedom is more important. Whose freedom? Not your concern, earthworm. But even those who say they’re pro-democracy are sketchy: why, if Jeff Bezos loves democracy so much, does Amazon have more full-time lobbyists living in Washington DC than there are US senators? Elon Musk makes big claims about arresting the climate crisis, yet if you pay any serious attention to his focus, his real escape plan is to space. That is not going to work for all of us, even if it’s what we want, and I sure as hell don’t.
Whether it is the Sacklers, endowing art galleries while the family business simultaneously destroys the fabric of society with opioids, or Rishi Sunak, donating £100,000 to the private Winchester College while his local primary school can’t afford computers, the problem with high net worth individuals is that their interests and those of society are misaligned by definition. Cash is like power: it can’t be given, it has to be taken. Relax, I’m not talking about robbing them: I mean tax.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
