New story about Dustin Moskovitz, EA, his meeting with Joe Biden, plans for the 2024 election, and his beef with Marc Andreessen over AI

teddyschleifer20 Mar 2024 20:32 UTC
19 points
15 comments2 min readEA link

Hey folks, popping in here to share a new piece that I thought might be of interest to friends in EA. I have a feeling you’ll know a few of the people mentioned, and there are lots of exclusive details about Dustin Moskovitz’s work that you might not know about.

Our publication, Puck, requires a subscription — but you can trade an email to read a story, do a free trial, or consider subscribing! I write about political and philanthropic donors, and am going to spend a lot of the year covering their moves ahead of the November race.

Here’s the piece, and here are the first few paragraphs:

On a Thursday in February, the same morning that he was scheduled to meet with the widow of Alexey Navalny, Joe Biden found himself at the Fairmont Hotel, atop Nob Hill, staring at a total stranger half his age. Dustin Moskovitz, the 39-year-old billionaire seated across from him, was probably more responsible than any other donor for vaulting Biden into the presidency. And yet, somehow, the two had never met.

Moskovitz, like the other Harvard kids who won the roommate lottery with Mark Zuckerberg and became Silicon Valley royalty, is often dismissed as some accidental co-founder of Facebook, the ultimate example of being in the right place at the right time. But Moskovitz caught lightning in a bottle a second time with Asana, the public software company he founded in 2008. He and his partner in all things, former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari Tuna, whom he met on a blind date, would become the patron saints of effective altruism—particularly during the post-S.B.F. correction—with $25 billion to dole out through their Open Philanthropy charity.

Moskovitz is unlike any other ultra-wealthy donor I have covered: insanely intelligent and well-read on political topics, but also skeptical, almost hostile, toward the influence-peddling game. For all his earnestness, he has sometimes appeared to shirk the civic duty he extols, shying away from using his money to achieve his political objectives. In September 2016, before committing $20 million to groups backing Hillary Clinton, he wrote a Medium essay entitled “Compelled to Act” that bared his introspection. “This decision was not easy, particularly because we have reservations about anyone using large amounts of money to influence elections,” he wrote. “That said, we believe in trying to do as much good as we can, which in this case means using the tools available to us.” He would later express regret about getting involved in the election too late.

Four years later, Moskovitz spent more $50 million to elect Biden—and the real number, accounting for dark money donations, is probably more like twice that, I’m told. The ostensible predicate of the Moskovitz-Biden summit at the Fairmont, previously unreported, was to discuss safety in artificial intelligence, a topic that has consumed Dustin during the last year or two, as it has for so many effective altruists. But the subtext was obvious: Wouldn’t it be great if Moskovitz and Tuna could fork over that amount of cash again? Shortly thereafter, the couple cut at least one “super-max” check ($929,000) to the Biden campaign, I’m told, and I hear this is just the start. “Cari and I were excited to meet President Biden and thank him for his work,” Moskovitz told me.

teddyschleifer20 Mar 2024 20:32 UTC
19 points
15 comments2 min readEA link