One difference is that Melinda owns the money she’s putting into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From a certain cynical point of view, EA is mostly a bunch of white entitled Silicon Valley men with a side hustle as “charity influencers,” obsessed with how rich people spend their money, but who don’t themselves actually have much to give. Melinda is making a sacrifice, EAs are just smiling at the ribbon-cutting. Furthermore, Melinda exclusively focused on issues that read as charitable, while EA’s high interest in X-risk can be portrayed as sci-fi anxieties. It also probably helps that Melinda didn’t herself do anything morally questionable to acquire her money—she convinced a man who’d formerly been seen as a selfish tech villain to donate their fortune.
EA has a wide attack surface, and I think we’d sustain big coordination costs to change our name, while not appreciably decreasing the size of that attack surface. Besides, “beset by scandal, shadowy Silicon Valley movement rebrands itself to hide from scrutiny” is a story that writes itself.
One difference is that Melinda owns the money she’s putting into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From a certain cynical point of view, EA is mostly a bunch of white entitled Silicon Valley men with a side hustle as “charity influencers,” obsessed with how rich people spend their money, but who don’t themselves actually have much to give. Melinda is making a sacrifice, EAs are just smiling at the ribbon-cutting. Furthermore, Melinda exclusively focused on issues that read as charitable, while EA’s high interest in X-risk can be portrayed as sci-fi anxieties. It also probably helps that Melinda didn’t herself do anything morally questionable to acquire her money—she convinced a man who’d formerly been seen as a selfish tech villain to donate their fortune.
EA has a wide attack surface, and I think we’d sustain big coordination costs to change our name, while not appreciably decreasing the size of that attack surface. Besides, “beset by scandal, shadowy Silicon Valley movement rebrands itself to hide from scrutiny” is a story that writes itself.