Rebecca Kagan believes “EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community’s relationship with FTX.” She is farfromtheonlyperson who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan’s experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV’s board, Kagan wrote:
“I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed. (In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations after the fraud was revealed).
In this post, I describe a large and growing body of evidence that is consistent with Kagan’s concerns about (some parts of) EA leadership.[1] To summarize my review of the public record:
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters including SBF’s tenure on CEA’s board, his brief tenure as a CEA employee, and his status as one of 80k and CEA’s largest donors before he even founded Alameda.
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments (or lack thereof) from EA leaders and credible media reports about important issues. These include whether leaders knew about allegations of unethical behavior by SBF in the wake of the Alameda dispute, whether they were aware of allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships, and whether a Slack group of EA leaders ignored warnings just four months prior to FTX’s collapse that SBF was under criminal investigation.
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading, most notably framing Effective Ventures’ board changes as “institutional reform” when Kagan resigned precisely because she thought such reform was lacking.
I don’t claim to have a complete understanding of these issues, and I’ve included lists of the outstanding questions I think are most important in the hopes that other community members can shed light on them. It’s quite possible that answering these questions would reveal additional instances of troubling behavior[2] (though I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX’s massive fraud). It’s also quite possible that answering these questions would uncover mitigating factors I’m not aware of that would justify how EA leaders have behaved.
But with the current state of public knowledge, the community as a whole has a poor understanding of what happened. Relevant information is incomplete and/or highly dispersed. No single person or entity has a grasp of the full picture. That makes it impossible to know which behaviors were reasonable, and which were mistakes that the community should be learning from.
An independent investigation would solve this problem. It could answer open questions, collect wide-ranging perspectives, and share critical lessons with the entire community. And an independent post-mortem could do so in a credible and responsible way. In Rob Bensinger’s words, “An investigation can discover useful facts and share them privately, and its public write-up can accurately convey the broad strokes of what happened, and a large number of the details, while taking basic steps to protect the innocent.”
Kagan’s allegations, together with the issues I describe in the body of this post, suggest there is enough risk that some EA leaders made mistakes with respect to FTX “and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations” to warrant an independent post-mortem.
The warnings about SBF shared to the EA leaders Slack Channel provide an excellent example of the problems with the status quo:
Nobody has publicly disputed the existence of the Slack warnings
Now 20 months after FTX went bankrupt no EA leader has publicly acknowledged the warnings other than to deny that they personally saw them.
No EA leader has publicly acknowledged that with the benefit of hindsight, mistakes were made in how the warnings were handled
The EA community (or at least the portion that isn’t part of the Slack channel) is completely clueless about who saw the warnings, what (if anything) was done about them, and what should be done to prevent similar mistakes going forward.
I struggle to see how anyone can have confidence that this same group of leaders has learned, and will help the broader community learn, the appropriate lessons from the FTX debacle.
“This has been the worst setback the community has ever faced… Now looking to effective altruism’s second decade, there’s time to address its problems, and build something much better. Indeed, now is probably going to be one of the best ever opportunities we’re going to have to do that.”
The amount of time that has transpired and the lack of progress that has occurred since this was written in March of 2023 represents both a lost opportunity and a clear illustration of why an independent investigation is sorely needed.
****************************************
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters.
Even now, there hasn’t been a clear public communication from any EA leader, individual, or organization that simply spells out the facts around SBF’s relationship with the EA community and key EA organizations. There’s no dispute that meaningful relationships existed. But I find the lack of a proactive description or acknowledgement of those relationships troubling, and attempts to downplay or avoid discussing those relationships even more so.
Circa ~2017, SBF was one of 80k and CEA’s largest donors.
Before Alameda was even founded, SBF was a major donor to both 80k and CEA, a fact that clearly could have impacted how those organizational leaders may have viewed SBF at the time and subsequently. Yet the closest I’ve seen to this being proactively disclosed was Will mentioning in passing on Spencer’s podcast that while SBF was at Jane Street “he was also donating to organizations that promoted effective altruism. So I think that included 80,000 hours and Center for Effective Altruism.”[3] Given Will’s deep involvement with both organizations, and the scale of SBF’s giving to them, I would expect Will to be quite confident that SBF was a donor during the period in question.
In fact, at the time SBF was one of 80k’s four largest donors and had donated 10% (or more) of the total revenue 80k had raised in its first six years of existence.[4] He was also one of CEA’s largest donors (during a period when Will was CEO of CEA), per Michael Lewis’ reporting.[5]
I don’t think 80k or CEA did anything wrong in taking SBF’s gifts at the time; it would have been bizarre if they hadn’t. But I find it worrisome that while a variety of 80k leaders have publishedreflections or otherwise opined on the FTX saga, 80k’s as an organization has a discussion of FTX on its “mistakes” page, none of these have mentioned SBF’s history as a major donor. And I have not seen any acknowledgement of his role as a major donor to CEA while at Jane Street, aside from Will’s brief and hedged mention on Spencer’s podcast quoted above.[6]
SBF served on CEA’s board.
The only place I’ve seen this fact acknowledged by an EA leader or organization has been a (literal) footnote as part of Will’s April 2024 public reflections. The footnote omits important context such as the duration of SBF’s tenure (Kerry Vaughan has tweeted that it extended from 2016 to 2019) or how SBF came to join the board (Vaughan suggests Will had a personal role).
“Some of 80k’s own staff were part of the early Alameda cohort who left and thought SBF was a bad actor. In an honest accounting of mistakes made, it seems strange not to acknowledge that 80k (and others) missed an important red flag in 2018, and didn’t put any emphasis on it when talking to/promoting SBF.”
This comment was on Ben Todd’s post-FTX reflections post, which didn’t mention the 2018 warnings at all even when they were clearly relevant to the points he was making.[7] There is also no mention of warnings from the Alameda dispute in the discussion of FTX-related mistakes on CEA and 80k’s website (bizarrely, the FTX section of CEA’s mistakes page suggests that no FTX-related mistakes were made by CEA staff or CEA as an organization).[8]
Open questions:
What were SBF, Caroline, Gary, and Nishad’s formal and informal ties to the EA community?
Which organizations and individuals were they major donors to? When did these donations take place, and how significant were they relative to the size of the organizations? Which organizations did they work at, or advise, and when?
Are there other formal or informal ways that EA community coordinated with them or promoted them, individually or as a group?
What other personal or financial ties between EA and FTX exist that might be relevant?
Did any EA leaders vouch for SBF and/or Alameda to Alameda’s early funders (e.g. Jaan Tallinn and Luke Ding?)
It appears that when SBF left Jane Street to join CEA as Director of Development, he was already planning to start Alameda.[9] Was anyone in CEA leadership aware of those plans? Is there any evidence that the CEA role was “a ruse to avoid JS learning about true intentions?”
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments from EA leaders and credible media reports.
Just because a media outlet, even a credible one, reports something doesn’t make it a fact. However, there is a disturbing pattern of credible media reports that conflict with accounts offered by EA leaders, or that raise important questions that have gone unaddressed by EA leaders.
Will’s professed ignorance about inappropriate romantic relationships SBF had while at Alameda directly conflicts with Time’s reporting on the subject.
On the Clearer Thinking podcast, Will told Spencer that he was aware of only a single relationship SBF had with a professional colleague, and to Will’s knowledge it wasn’t a problematic one: “Midway through 2022,I heard about, like, one person at early Alameda that he dated… not even really an employee. But yeah, but someone at the same organization. I didn’t hear like “and it was bad” or anything.”[10]
This directly contradicts Time’s reporting. Time specifically reported that in 2018 Will (among others) heard allegations about SBF’s problematic relationships on multiple occasions: “Sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy [and] had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates...”
Will’s characterization of what complaints he heard about SBF related to the Alameda dispute, and when he heard them, conflicts with Time’s reporting
On multiple occasions Will characterized the specific complaints he had heard about SBF from former Alameda employees as being about his business competence (e.g. Sam was a bad manager and too willing to take risk), but never mentioned hearing complaints about SBF’s ethics. Time, however, reports that significant ethical concerns were raised, and to Will specifically:
Mac Aulay and others warned MacAskill, Beckstead and Karnofsky about her co-founder’s alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions. Mac Aulay specifically flagged her concerns about Bankman-Fried’s honesty and trustworthiness, his maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise, his pattern of unethical behavior, and his inappropriate relationships with subordinates, sources say.
Will has not (to my knowledge) claimed that he never heard concerns about SBF’s ethics, so I think he has probably been making true statements about what he did hear. That said, I consider those statements misleading (and certainly not forthcoming) if Will did in fact hear ethical complaints as Time alleges. And if Will’s first public reflections in 18 months after FTX collapsed included carefully crafted statements that were technically true but in practice misleading, I would consider that to be quite worrisome and potentially indicative of deeper problems.
In addition to the discrepancy about the substance of the complaints he heard, Will’s account of when he heard them also conflicts with Time. Will has claimed “I wasn’t involved in the dispute; I heard about it only afterwards” while Time reported that Will was warned about SBF by others at Alameda “in the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation [where co-founders tried to force SBF out].”
Nobody in EA leadership has publicly acknowledged the New Yorker’s report that many leaders received warnings that SBF was being investigated for criminal behavior four months before FTX’s collapse (other than to deny personally having seen said warnings)
The New Yorker reports that in July 2022 a private Slack group for EA leaders received a warning that someone in government was investigating SBF for a crime. The person who shared that also added “my point in sharing this is to raise awareness that a) in some circles SBF’s reputation is very bad b) in some circles SBF’s reputation is closely tied to EA, and c) there’s some chance SBF’s reputation gets much, much worse… it seems like a major PR vulnerability.” The New Yorker goes on to add “according to someone on the Slack, there was “surprisingly little engagement. Mostly ‘thanks for the flag.’ When I asked if it was possible that the leaders hadn’t seen the warning, the Slack participant told me, “I honestly can’t imagine it went unnoticed.”
A group of EA leaders received an extraordinarily prescient warning just four months prior to FTX’s collapse. Yet the EA community is completely in the dark about what, if anything, was done about it (for example, was CEA’s Communications team alerted about the potential “major PR vulnerability”?). The only mention of the Slack warning I’ve seen is Will’s response to an inquiry from the author of the New Yorker article: “With respect to specific Slack messages, I don’t recall seeing the warnings you described.”
EA leadership has not acknowledged an internal CEA investigation and/or board assessment conducted relating to Alameda, which both Time and Semafor have reported
Time reports that “Sometime [in 2019], the Centre for Effective Altruism did an internal investigation relating to CEA and Alameda, according to one person who was contacted during the investigation… it was conducted in part by MacAskill.” Time implies that SBF’s departure from CEA’s board in 2019 was related to this investigation; MacAskill’s account of SBF’s departure is quite vague (“In mid-2019, we decided to start to reform the board, and Sam agreed to step down.”)[11]
Semafor reported that in 2018, CEA “trustees considered allegations that Bankman-Fried had engaged in unethical business practices at his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, but ultimately took no action, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.”
I’ve seen no acknowledgement of either investigation’s existence or findings from MacAskill (or any other EA leaders), even though there have been natural opportunities to mention these investigations if they actually took place.[12] (It also seems plausible that Time and Semafor are referencing the same incident, and that one of these sources is wrong about the date). If one or more investigations did take place and if records of it remain, that paper trail could shed light on unresolved discrepancies (e.g. whether or not Will was aware of concerns about SBF’s inappropriate romantic relationships).
Open questions:
What warning signs existed about FTX?
Which if any EA leaders knew about them, when did they learn about them, and what did they do about them?
How many EA leaders had serious concerns about SBF’s morals/ethics and the implications for EA before the fraud, based on what, and what did they do about it?
Who saw the July 2022 Slack group warning about SBF? Who was in the group, and who acknowledged (even in passing) having seen the warning? Did anyone do anything?
Was there a CEA assessment into SBF? If so, when did it take place, and what did it look like?
Was CEA’s Communications team ever made aware of the Alameda dispute, the Slack group warning (which included the specific warning “there’s some chance SBF’s reputation gets much, much worse”), or other concerns about SBF? If so, what (if anything) did they do in response to those warnings?
To what extent were members of the EA community aware that FTX and Alameda were more entangled than they were publicly portrayed to be?
How well known in the EA community were lavish aspects of SBF’s lifestyle? Were people who portrayed SBF as frugal to others aware of evidence he wasn’t frugal?
What due diligence was done around FTX?
What due diligence did Nick Beckstead (and/or others) conduct around the creation of the Future Fund?
What due diligence did EV conduct before accepting donations from SBF/Future Fund? Did it follow the guidelines that were allegedly established in the wake of an earlier embarrassing instance of accepting donations from a crypto billionaire running an offshore exchange who subsequently ran into legal problems?
Are EA leaders being forthcoming in their communications about EA and FTX after the collapse?
Did SBF have inappropriate relationships that Will, Nick, or others knew about or heard allegations of?
Were there ethical concerns about SBF after Alameda that Will, Nick, Holden or others knew about (and if so—specifically what)?
Does Tara Mac Aulay agree with how Will characterized (on the Clearer Thinking podcast) a heated conversation they had after the Alameda split? Time quotes Naia Bouscal as saying “Will basically threatened Tara”, but on Clearer Thinking Will said he spoke with Tara and “they don’t think I was like intending to intimidate them or anything like that.” Tara’s perspective on this issue would obviously be valuable.
Did Will encourage, or help, SBF to get his initial internship at Jane Street as described in the Sequoia puff piece?[13]
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading
As mentioned above, Rebecca Kagan has explicitly said she left the EV board due to concerns about how EV and EA leaders handled FTX both before and after the company collapsed. Yet in the Washington Post, Zach Robinson (head of CEA) framed board changes as part of “institutional reform” (“We have… reformed the governance of our organization, replacing leadership on the board and the staff.”) And on his podcast appearance with Spencer Greenberg, Will does not mention Kagan when talking about substantial turnover among EA leadership roles (including, but not limited to EV’s board) and instead suggests that to the extent FTX contributed to leadership turnover it was due to indirect causes like burnout.[14]
Oliver Habryka has also called into question Robinson’s claim that staff leadership changes were related to governance reform:
“I don’t know of any staff that was let go as a result of FTX reflections (and I have asked about this repeatedly). Many people quit, but nobody was fired for any FTX things among leadership, and nobody who quit would have been fired. There is some small chance I am missing some supposed staff changes here, but claiming that CEA “replaced leadership on the staff” as a result of FTX seems straightforwardly false.”
The Mintz investigation is another instance where leadership has arguably overstated the degree of reform. Will told Spencer that “Effective Ventures commissioned a law firm to do an investigation into, you know, relationships between the charity and FTX.” It has been suggested that the law firm had a much narrower mandate, and was really only trying to establish that EV had no prior awareness of FTX’s criminal fraud. To the extent the law firm indeed had a very narrow mandate and Will suggests a much broader investigation, Will’s comments could be construed as misleading.
Open questions
EV’s board has entirely turned over since FTX’s collapse. Did any other board members or senior staff share (in whole or in part) the concerns raised by Rebecca Kagan?
What was the scope/mandate of the independent legal investigation that EV solicited? How much (if at all) did the scope extend beyond establishing whether anyone at EV was aware of SBF’s criminal fraud? Did the investigation uncover any mistakes made by EV and/or others in the EA community, and what improvements are suggested by those mistakes?
Did the independent legal investigation lead to any concrete changes?
What specific changes have EV, CEA, 80K, or other important organizations made to improve governance in the wake of FTX?
Has anyone in an EA leadership position been fired or reprimanded for mistakes made relating to FTX?
When I make claims of the form “EA leaders/organizations did X” I mean it in the sense of “at least one EA leader/organization did X” not “all EA leaders/organizations did X”. I also want to be explicit that I think different EA leaders/organizations should be held to different standards, e.g. I think it is much more reasonable for Open Phil to hear concerns about SBF (another funder) and not act than it would be for CEA (where SBF was for a time a board member and employee) or 80k (which promoted SBF aggressively) to act the same way.
I also want to acknowledge that some EA leaders have shared valuable reflections and/or information with the broader community. In my opinion, posts by Nate Soares and Ben West stand out in this regard.
80k’s website shows that SBF donated between £100,000 – 400,000 and did so “pre-2017”. This period was prior to Open Philanthropy starting to fund 80k, so SBF’s giving accounted for a significant amount of 80k’s budget. By May 2017, 80k’s website lists SBF as one of four donors who had given “over £100,000”. For context, the website at that time notes that as of December 2016 the organization “had received around £1,000,000 in donations” since its inception, meaning SBF had accounted for over 10% of the total revenue 80k had raised in its first six years of existence (and potentially much more).
From Going Infinite: “Three years into his career at Jane Street… he’d given away most of the money he’d made on the trading floor to three charities… Two of those charities, 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Oxford philosophers had started themselves.” Also: “Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors.” Note that between July 2016 and October 2017, Will was actually CEO at CEA with Tara serving as COO, so Sam was one of Will’s biggest donors as much or more than he was one of Tara’s biggest donors.
The lack of acknowledgement of SBF’s role as a donor is problematic because it helps obscure which lessons should be learned from this whole affair.
For example, 80K’s co-founder and long-time CEO Ben Todd wrote a ~6,000 word post on how he’s updated post-FTX, including a discussion of how biases might have clouded his judgment, and omitted any mention of how SBF was already a major donor by the time the Alameda allegations were first made. The vast majority of people would be biased in favor of someone who provided them significant financial support, that’s simply human nature. So omitting this relationship seems like either poor judgment (if the rationale was that disclosing the relationship wasn’t important) or evasive communication (if the rationale was trying to limit awareness of that relationship).
Similarly, Will MacAskill lists some of the lessons he’s drawn from FTX as “I think I’ve been too trusting of people” and “the key thing, in my view, is to pay attention to people’s local incentives when trying to predict their behaviour.” But he does not draw a connection between his own local incentives (favor the person donating large sums to your organization and promising to donate even more) and his own willingness to trust SBF.
One personal update Todd listed, but did not elaborate on, was: “If you have concerns about someone, don’t expect that the presence of people you’re not concerned around them will prevent dangerous action, especially if that person seems unusually strong willed.” It seems likely this was written with the Alameda dispute in mind, making this a natural and obvious place to mention it.
Some EA leaders were relatively quick to mention that they had heard about the Alameda dispute, including Holden Karnofsky and Nate Soares. Will MacAskill also acknowledged hearing about these concerns, though not until April 2024.
Karnofsky’s relatively timely recognition that there were red flags that with hindsight should have gotten more attention is the sort of common sense acknowledgment I would have hoped and expected from more EA leaders and organizations:
“I do think there were signs of things to be concerned about with respect to SBF and FTX. He ran this Alameda company, and there were a number of people who had worked there who’d left very upset with how things had gone down. And I did hear from some of them what had gone wrong and from their perspective what they were unhappy about.
There were things that made me say … I certainly see some reasons that one could be concerned, that one could imagine low-integrity behavior, less than honest and scrupulous behavior. At the same time, I just don’t think I knew anything that rose to the level of expecting what happened to happen or really being in a position to go around denouncing him.
Now it feels a little bit different in hindsight. And some of that does feel regrettable in hindsight.”
Zvi’s review of Going Infinite, which contains some of his personal experience with SBF and Jane Street, provides strong evidence of this:
Then a bit later, SBF decided to leave Jane Street, because he discovered the Japan and South Korea Bitcoin arbitrage trade, and he wanted the trade all to himself.
This is one place I will introduce myself into the story a tiny bit. When Sam decided to quit, the two of us went for a walk in the park. He said he was leaving to run or at least help run CEA, the Center for Effective Altruism.
Which was not a crazy fit. Sam was clearly deeply into EA and the thesis that he could be a major upgrade there seemed plausible, as did the possibility that from his perspective this could be high leverage. I was confused by his decision, Jane Street seemed like a better fit for him, but we strategized a bit about how good could be done and I wished him the best of luck.
As we all know now, he was, as with everyone else, lying right to my face.
[From Going Infinite:] During his final weeks at Jane Street, Sam traveled to Boston just to tell Gary about his plan to make a billion dollars trading crypto for effective altruistic causes. (1,423)
He admit it. He was not leaving to join CEA. He was leaving to pursue the Japan trade. And he had decided that I was not someone he wanted to bring in on that.
Will’s only public commentary on, or acknowledgement of, Sam’s time on the board is a footnote that reads in its entirety:
“Sam was on the board of CEA US at the time (early 2018). Around that time, after the dispute, I asked the investor that I was in touch with whether Sam should be removed from the board, and the investor said there was no need. A CEA employee (who wasn’t connected to Alameda) brought up the idea that Sam should transition off the board, because he didn’t help improve diversity of the board, didn’t provide unique skills or experience, and that CEA now employed former Alameda employees who were unhappy with him. Over the course of the year that followed, Sam was also becoming busier and less available. In mid-2019, we decided to start to reform the board, and Sam agreed to step down.”
This comment (particularly the first footnote, which I’ve quoted in my previous footnote) would be a natural place to discuss a CEA investigation if one took place, as would the ~13:00-15:50 section of the Clearer Thinking podcast.
While I don’t consider the Sequoia piece particularly credible, its description of Will’s role in SBF’s internship at Jane Street warrants further investigation: “His course established, MacAskill gave SBF one last navigational nudge to set him on his way, suggesting that SBF get an internship at Jane Street that summer.”
If the Sequoia profile is correct about this, Will’s description of this matter on the Sam Harris and Clearer Thinking podcasts appears misleading. On both podcasts, he omits any mention of his own role and instead frames SBF getting the internship as a demonstration of his “autonomy”.
Sam Harris (8:20): “He found the ideas [behind earning to give] compelling. We discussed it back and forth at the time. I next met him something like 6 months later at a vegan conference. We hadn’t been much in touch in that period. He told me he’d gotten an internship at Jane Street which is this quantitative trading fund. And that was very impressive I thought. He seemed just this very autonomous very morally motivated person.”
Clearer Thinking (11:50): “When I then met him six months again, six months later [after initially discussing earning to give], he had told me that ohh, he’s actually got a internship at this trading firm Jane Street and that just seemed, you know, impressively autonomous to me.”
Will on leadership changes: “There’s actually been a remarkable just refresh in EA leadership, at least in the sense of like the organizational leadership. Let’s see, I mean the CEO’s of Center for Effective Altruism, 80,000 hours, Open Philanthropy, Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks (not its CEO, but like, lead): all of those are different. The Board of Effective Ventures is either wholly different or will be, or are people who are like planning to move on. And so you know, I do think this isn’t like directly caused by the FTX collapse and sometimes it’s indirect where the collapse just caused people to like really burn out because there was just so much to do and it was like, you know, the work was just pretty grueling for quite a while. Or in other cases it’s more just like, OK, let’s each have kind of like more of a focus.” (01:34:45)
We need an independent investigation into how EA leadership has handled SBF and FTX
Summary
Rebecca Kagan believes “EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community’s relationship with FTX.” She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan’s experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV’s board, Kagan wrote:
In this post, I describe a large and growing body of evidence that is consistent with Kagan’s concerns about (some parts of) EA leadership.[1] To summarize my review of the public record:
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters including SBF’s tenure on CEA’s board, his brief tenure as a CEA employee, and his status as one of 80k and CEA’s largest donors before he even founded Alameda.
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments (or lack thereof) from EA leaders and credible media reports about important issues. These include whether leaders knew about allegations of unethical behavior by SBF in the wake of the Alameda dispute, whether they were aware of allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships, and whether a Slack group of EA leaders ignored warnings just four months prior to FTX’s collapse that SBF was under criminal investigation.
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading, most notably framing Effective Ventures’ board changes as “institutional reform” when Kagan resigned precisely because she thought such reform was lacking.
I don’t claim to have a complete understanding of these issues, and I’ve included lists of the outstanding questions I think are most important in the hopes that other community members can shed light on them. It’s quite possible that answering these questions would reveal additional instances of troubling behavior[2] (though I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX’s massive fraud). It’s also quite possible that answering these questions would uncover mitigating factors I’m not aware of that would justify how EA leaders have behaved.
But with the current state of public knowledge, the community as a whole has a poor understanding of what happened. Relevant information is incomplete and/or highly dispersed. No single person or entity has a grasp of the full picture. That makes it impossible to know which behaviors were reasonable, and which were mistakes that the community should be learning from.
An independent investigation would solve this problem. It could answer open questions, collect wide-ranging perspectives, and share critical lessons with the entire community. And an independent post-mortem could do so in a credible and responsible way. In Rob Bensinger’s words, “An investigation can discover useful facts and share them privately, and its public write-up can accurately convey the broad strokes of what happened, and a large number of the details, while taking basic steps to protect the innocent.”
Kagan’s allegations, together with the issues I describe in the body of this post, suggest there is enough risk that some EA leaders made mistakes with respect to FTX “and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations” to warrant an independent post-mortem.
The warnings about SBF shared to the EA leaders Slack Channel provide an excellent example of the problems with the status quo:
Nobody has publicly disputed the existence of the Slack warnings
People might reasonably have delayed commenting until the the investigations conducted by Mintz and the UK Charity Commission were complete, but those were wrapped up in September and December of 2023 respectively
Now 20 months after FTX went bankrupt no EA leader has publicly acknowledged the warnings other than to deny that they personally saw them.
No EA leader has publicly acknowledged that with the benefit of hindsight, mistakes were made in how the warnings were handled
The EA community (or at least the portion that isn’t part of the Slack channel) is completely clueless about who saw the warnings, what (if anything) was done about them, and what should be done to prevent similar mistakes going forward.
I struggle to see how anyone can have confidence that this same group of leaders has learned, and will help the broader community learn, the appropriate lessons from the FTX debacle.
Ben Todd was correct when he wrote:
The amount of time that has transpired and the lack of progress that has occurred since this was written in March of 2023 represents both a lost opportunity and a clear illustration of why an independent investigation is sorely needed.
****************************************
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters.
Even now, there hasn’t been a clear public communication from any EA leader, individual, or organization that simply spells out the facts around SBF’s relationship with the EA community and key EA organizations. There’s no dispute that meaningful relationships existed. But I find the lack of a proactive description or acknowledgement of those relationships troubling, and attempts to downplay or avoid discussing those relationships even more so.
Circa ~2017, SBF was one of 80k and CEA’s largest donors.
Before Alameda was even founded, SBF was a major donor to both 80k and CEA, a fact that clearly could have impacted how those organizational leaders may have viewed SBF at the time and subsequently. Yet the closest I’ve seen to this being proactively disclosed was Will mentioning in passing on Spencer’s podcast that while SBF was at Jane Street “he was also donating to organizations that promoted effective altruism. So I think that included 80,000 hours and Center for Effective Altruism.”[3] Given Will’s deep involvement with both organizations, and the scale of SBF’s giving to them, I would expect Will to be quite confident that SBF was a donor during the period in question.
In fact, at the time SBF was one of 80k’s four largest donors and had donated 10% (or more) of the total revenue 80k had raised in its first six years of existence.[4] He was also one of CEA’s largest donors (during a period when Will was CEO of CEA), per Michael Lewis’ reporting.[5]
I don’t think 80k or CEA did anything wrong in taking SBF’s gifts at the time; it would have been bizarre if they hadn’t. But I find it worrisome that while a variety of 80k leaders have published reflections or otherwise opined on the FTX saga, 80k’s as an organization has a discussion of FTX on its “mistakes” page, none of these have mentioned SBF’s history as a major donor. And I have not seen any acknowledgement of his role as a major donor to CEA while at Jane Street, aside from Will’s brief and hedged mention on Spencer’s podcast quoted above.[6]
SBF served on CEA’s board.
The only place I’ve seen this fact acknowledged by an EA leader or organization has been a (literal) footnote as part of Will’s April 2024 public reflections. The footnote omits important context such as the duration of SBF’s tenure (Kerry Vaughan has tweeted that it extended from 2016 to 2019) or how SBF came to join the board (Vaughan suggests Will had a personal role).
SBF worked for CEA.
Immediately prior to founding Alameda, SBF was briefly (~2 months) employed as CEA’s Director of Development. I’ve never seen this fact acknowledged in any EA communications or reflections that have followed FTX’s collapse.
Multiple EA leaders and organizations were aware about allegations stemming from the Alameda dispute.
As one Forum commenter noted:
This comment was on Ben Todd’s post-FTX reflections post, which didn’t mention the 2018 warnings at all even when they were clearly relevant to the points he was making.[7] There is also no mention of warnings from the Alameda dispute in the discussion of FTX-related mistakes on CEA and 80k’s website (bizarrely, the FTX section of CEA’s mistakes page suggests that no FTX-related mistakes were made by CEA staff or CEA as an organization).[8]
Open questions:
What were SBF, Caroline, Gary, and Nishad’s formal and informal ties to the EA community?
Which organizations and individuals were they major donors to? When did these donations take place, and how significant were they relative to the size of the organizations? Which organizations did they work at, or advise, and when?
Are there other formal or informal ways that EA community coordinated with them or promoted them, individually or as a group?
What other personal or financial ties between EA and FTX exist that might be relevant?
Did any EA leaders vouch for SBF and/or Alameda to Alameda’s early funders (e.g. Jaan Tallinn and Luke Ding?)
It appears that when SBF left Jane Street to join CEA as Director of Development, he was already planning to start Alameda.[9] Was anyone in CEA leadership aware of those plans? Is there any evidence that the CEA role was “a ruse to avoid JS learning about true intentions?”
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments from EA leaders and credible media reports.
Just because a media outlet, even a credible one, reports something doesn’t make it a fact. However, there is a disturbing pattern of credible media reports that conflict with accounts offered by EA leaders, or that raise important questions that have gone unaddressed by EA leaders.
Will’s professed ignorance about inappropriate romantic relationships SBF had while at Alameda directly conflicts with Time’s reporting on the subject.
On the Clearer Thinking podcast, Will told Spencer that he was aware of only a single relationship SBF had with a professional colleague, and to Will’s knowledge it wasn’t a problematic one: “Midway through 2022,I heard about, like, one person at early Alameda that he dated… not even really an employee. But yeah, but someone at the same organization. I didn’t hear like “and it was bad” or anything.”[10]
This directly contradicts Time’s reporting. Time specifically reported that in 2018 Will (among others) heard allegations about SBF’s problematic relationships on multiple occasions: “Sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy [and] had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates...”
Will’s characterization of what complaints he heard about SBF related to the Alameda dispute, and when he heard them, conflicts with Time’s reporting
On multiple occasions Will characterized the specific complaints he had heard about SBF from former Alameda employees as being about his business competence (e.g. Sam was a bad manager and too willing to take risk), but never mentioned hearing complaints about SBF’s ethics. Time, however, reports that significant ethical concerns were raised, and to Will specifically:
Mac Aulay and others warned MacAskill, Beckstead and Karnofsky about her co-founder’s alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions. Mac Aulay specifically flagged her concerns about Bankman-Fried’s honesty and trustworthiness, his maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise, his pattern of unethical behavior, and his inappropriate relationships with subordinates, sources say.
Will has not (to my knowledge) claimed that he never heard concerns about SBF’s ethics, so I think he has probably been making true statements about what he did hear. That said, I consider those statements misleading (and certainly not forthcoming) if Will did in fact hear ethical complaints as Time alleges. And if Will’s first public reflections in 18 months after FTX collapsed included carefully crafted statements that were technically true but in practice misleading, I would consider that to be quite worrisome and potentially indicative of deeper problems.
In addition to the discrepancy about the substance of the complaints he heard, Will’s account of when he heard them also conflicts with Time. Will has claimed “I wasn’t involved in the dispute; I heard about it only afterwards” while Time reported that Will was warned about SBF by others at Alameda “in the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation [where co-founders tried to force SBF out].”
Nobody in EA leadership has publicly acknowledged the New Yorker’s report that many leaders received warnings that SBF was being investigated for criminal behavior four months before FTX’s collapse (other than to deny personally having seen said warnings)
The New Yorker reports that in July 2022 a private Slack group for EA leaders received a warning that someone in government was investigating SBF for a crime. The person who shared that also added “my point in sharing this is to raise awareness that a) in some circles SBF’s reputation is very bad b) in some circles SBF’s reputation is closely tied to EA, and c) there’s some chance SBF’s reputation gets much, much worse… it seems like a major PR vulnerability.” The New Yorker goes on to add “according to someone on the Slack, there was “surprisingly little engagement. Mostly ‘thanks for the flag.’ When I asked if it was possible that the leaders hadn’t seen the warning, the Slack participant told me, “I honestly can’t imagine it went unnoticed.”
A group of EA leaders received an extraordinarily prescient warning just four months prior to FTX’s collapse. Yet the EA community is completely in the dark about what, if anything, was done about it (for example, was CEA’s Communications team alerted about the potential “major PR vulnerability”?). The only mention of the Slack warning I’ve seen is Will’s response to an inquiry from the author of the New Yorker article: “With respect to specific Slack messages, I don’t recall seeing the warnings you described.”
EA leadership has not acknowledged an internal CEA investigation and/or board assessment conducted relating to Alameda, which both Time and Semafor have reported
Time reports that “Sometime [in 2019], the Centre for Effective Altruism did an internal investigation relating to CEA and Alameda, according to one person who was contacted during the investigation… it was conducted in part by MacAskill.” Time implies that SBF’s departure from CEA’s board in 2019 was related to this investigation; MacAskill’s account of SBF’s departure is quite vague (“In mid-2019, we decided to start to reform the board, and Sam agreed to step down.”)[11]
Semafor reported that in 2018, CEA “trustees considered allegations that Bankman-Fried had engaged in unethical business practices at his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, but ultimately took no action, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.”
I’ve seen no acknowledgement of either investigation’s existence or findings from MacAskill (or any other EA leaders), even though there have been natural opportunities to mention these investigations if they actually took place.[12] (It also seems plausible that Time and Semafor are referencing the same incident, and that one of these sources is wrong about the date). If one or more investigations did take place and if records of it remain, that paper trail could shed light on unresolved discrepancies (e.g. whether or not Will was aware of concerns about SBF’s inappropriate romantic relationships).
Open questions:
What warning signs existed about FTX?
Which if any EA leaders knew about them, when did they learn about them, and what did they do about them?
How many EA leaders had serious concerns about SBF’s morals/ethics and the implications for EA before the fraud, based on what, and what did they do about it?
Who saw the July 2022 Slack group warning about SBF? Who was in the group, and who acknowledged (even in passing) having seen the warning? Did anyone do anything?
Was there a CEA assessment into SBF? If so, when did it take place, and what did it look like?
Was CEA’s Communications team ever made aware of the Alameda dispute, the Slack group warning (which included the specific warning “there’s some chance SBF’s reputation gets much, much worse”), or other concerns about SBF? If so, what (if anything) did they do in response to those warnings?
To what extent were members of the EA community aware that FTX and Alameda were more entangled than they were publicly portrayed to be?
How well known in the EA community were lavish aspects of SBF’s lifestyle? Were people who portrayed SBF as frugal to others aware of evidence he wasn’t frugal?
What due diligence was done around FTX?
What due diligence did Nick Beckstead (and/or others) conduct around the creation of the Future Fund?
What due diligence did EV conduct before accepting donations from SBF/Future Fund? Did it follow the guidelines that were allegedly established in the wake of an earlier embarrassing instance of accepting donations from a crypto billionaire running an offshore exchange who subsequently ran into legal problems?
Are EA leaders being forthcoming in their communications about EA and FTX after the collapse?
Did SBF have inappropriate relationships that Will, Nick, or others knew about or heard allegations of?
Were there ethical concerns about SBF after Alameda that Will, Nick, Holden or others knew about (and if so—specifically what)?
Does Tara Mac Aulay agree with how Will characterized (on the Clearer Thinking podcast) a heated conversation they had after the Alameda split? Time quotes Naia Bouscal as saying “Will basically threatened Tara”, but on Clearer Thinking Will said he spoke with Tara and “they don’t think I was like intending to intimidate them or anything like that.” Tara’s perspective on this issue would obviously be valuable.
Did Will encourage, or help, SBF to get his initial internship at Jane Street as described in the Sequoia puff piece?[13]
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading
As mentioned above, Rebecca Kagan has explicitly said she left the EV board due to concerns about how EV and EA leaders handled FTX both before and after the company collapsed. Yet in the Washington Post, Zach Robinson (head of CEA) framed board changes as part of “institutional reform” (“We have… reformed the governance of our organization, replacing leadership on the board and the staff.”) And on his podcast appearance with Spencer Greenberg, Will does not mention Kagan when talking about substantial turnover among EA leadership roles (including, but not limited to EV’s board) and instead suggests that to the extent FTX contributed to leadership turnover it was due to indirect causes like burnout.[14]
Oliver Habryka has also called into question Robinson’s claim that staff leadership changes were related to governance reform:
The Mintz investigation is another instance where leadership has arguably overstated the degree of reform. Will told Spencer that “Effective Ventures commissioned a law firm to do an investigation into, you know, relationships between the charity and FTX.” It has been suggested that the law firm had a much narrower mandate, and was really only trying to establish that EV had no prior awareness of FTX’s criminal fraud. To the extent the law firm indeed had a very narrow mandate and Will suggests a much broader investigation, Will’s comments could be construed as misleading.
Open questions
EV’s board has entirely turned over since FTX’s collapse. Did any other board members or senior staff share (in whole or in part) the concerns raised by Rebecca Kagan?
What was the scope/mandate of the independent legal investigation that EV solicited? How much (if at all) did the scope extend beyond establishing whether anyone at EV was aware of SBF’s criminal fraud? Did the investigation uncover any mistakes made by EV and/or others in the EA community, and what improvements are suggested by those mistakes?
Did the independent legal investigation lead to any concrete changes?
What specific changes have EV, CEA, 80K, or other important organizations made to improve governance in the wake of FTX?
Has anyone in an EA leadership position been fired or reprimanded for mistakes made relating to FTX?
When I make claims of the form “EA leaders/organizations did X” I mean it in the sense of “at least one EA leader/organization did X” not “all EA leaders/organizations did X”. I also want to be explicit that I think different EA leaders/organizations should be held to different standards, e.g. I think it is much more reasonable for Open Phil to hear concerns about SBF (another funder) and not act than it would be for CEA (where SBF was for a time a board member and employee) or 80k (which promoted SBF aggressively) to act the same way.
I also want to acknowledge that some EA leaders have shared valuable reflections and/or information with the broader community. In my opinion, posts by Nate Soares and Ben West stand out in this regard.
I’ve heard feedback from someone more knowledgeable about these issues than myself that the problems I’m describing aren’t the most serious ones.
(00:12:40)
80k’s website shows that SBF donated between £100,000 – 400,000 and did so “pre-2017”. This period was prior to Open Philanthropy starting to fund 80k, so SBF’s giving accounted for a significant amount of 80k’s budget. By May 2017, 80k’s website lists SBF as one of four donors who had given “over £100,000”. For context, the website at that time notes that as of December 2016 the organization “had received around £1,000,000 in donations” since its inception, meaning SBF had accounted for over 10% of the total revenue 80k had raised in its first six years of existence (and potentially much more).
From Going Infinite: “Three years into his career at Jane Street… he’d given away most of the money he’d made on the trading floor to three charities… Two of those charities, 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Oxford philosophers had started themselves.” Also: “Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors.” Note that between July 2016 and October 2017, Will was actually CEO at CEA with Tara serving as COO, so Sam was one of Will’s biggest donors as much or more than he was one of Tara’s biggest donors.
The lack of acknowledgement of SBF’s role as a donor is problematic because it helps obscure which lessons should be learned from this whole affair.
For example, 80K’s co-founder and long-time CEO Ben Todd wrote a ~6,000 word post on how he’s updated post-FTX, including a discussion of how biases might have clouded his judgment, and omitted any mention of how SBF was already a major donor by the time the Alameda allegations were first made. The vast majority of people would be biased in favor of someone who provided them significant financial support, that’s simply human nature. So omitting this relationship seems like either poor judgment (if the rationale was that disclosing the relationship wasn’t important) or evasive communication (if the rationale was trying to limit awareness of that relationship).
Similarly, Will MacAskill lists some of the lessons he’s drawn from FTX as “I think I’ve been too trusting of people” and “the key thing, in my view, is to pay attention to people’s local incentives when trying to predict their behaviour.” But he does not draw a connection between his own local incentives (favor the person donating large sums to your organization and promising to donate even more) and his own willingness to trust SBF.
One personal update Todd listed, but did not elaborate on, was: “If you have concerns about someone, don’t expect that the presence of people you’re not concerned around them will prevent dangerous action, especially if that person seems unusually strong willed.” It seems likely this was written with the Alameda dispute in mind, making this a natural and obvious place to mention it.
Some EA leaders were relatively quick to mention that they had heard about the Alameda dispute, including Holden Karnofsky and Nate Soares. Will MacAskill also acknowledged hearing about these concerns, though not until April 2024.
Karnofsky’s relatively timely recognition that there were red flags that with hindsight should have gotten more attention is the sort of common sense acknowledgment I would have hoped and expected from more EA leaders and organizations:
Zvi’s review of Going Infinite, which contains some of his personal experience with SBF and Jane Street, provides strong evidence of this:
Then a bit later, SBF decided to leave Jane Street, because he discovered the Japan and South Korea Bitcoin arbitrage trade, and he wanted the trade all to himself.
This is one place I will introduce myself into the story a tiny bit. When Sam decided to quit, the two of us went for a walk in the park. He said he was leaving to run or at least help run CEA, the Center for Effective Altruism.
Which was not a crazy fit. Sam was clearly deeply into EA and the thesis that he could be a major upgrade there seemed plausible, as did the possibility that from his perspective this could be high leverage. I was confused by his decision, Jane Street seemed like a better fit for him, but we strategized a bit about how good could be done and I wished him the best of luck.
As we all know now, he was, as with everyone else, lying right to my face.
He admit it. He was not leaving to join CEA. He was leaving to pursue the Japan trade. And he had decided that I was not someone he wanted to bring in on that.
(00:47:26)
Will’s only public commentary on, or acknowledgement of, Sam’s time on the board is a footnote that reads in its entirety:
This comment (particularly the first footnote, which I’ve quoted in my previous footnote) would be a natural place to discuss a CEA investigation if one took place, as would the ~13:00-15:50 section of the Clearer Thinking podcast.
While I don’t consider the Sequoia piece particularly credible, its description of Will’s role in SBF’s internship at Jane Street warrants further investigation: “His course established, MacAskill gave SBF one last navigational nudge to set him on his way, suggesting that SBF get an internship at Jane Street that summer.”
If the Sequoia profile is correct about this, Will’s description of this matter on the Sam Harris and Clearer Thinking podcasts appears misleading. On both podcasts, he omits any mention of his own role and instead frames SBF getting the internship as a demonstration of his “autonomy”.
Sam Harris (8:20): “He found the ideas [behind earning to give] compelling. We discussed it back and forth at the time. I next met him something like 6 months later at a vegan conference. We hadn’t been much in touch in that period. He told me he’d gotten an internship at Jane Street which is this quantitative trading fund. And that was very impressive I thought. He seemed just this very autonomous very morally motivated person.”
Clearer Thinking (11:50): “When I then met him six months again, six months later [after initially discussing earning to give], he had told me that ohh, he’s actually got a internship at this trading firm Jane Street and that just seemed, you know, impressively autonomous to me.”
Will on leadership changes: “There’s actually been a remarkable just refresh in EA leadership, at least in the sense of like the organizational leadership. Let’s see, I mean the CEO’s of Center for Effective Altruism, 80,000 hours, Open Philanthropy, Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks (not its CEO, but like, lead): all of those are different. The Board of Effective Ventures is either wholly different or will be, or are people who are like planning to move on. And so you know, I do think this isn’t like directly caused by the FTX collapse and sometimes it’s indirect where the collapse just caused people to like really burn out because there was just so much to do and it was like, you know, the work was just pretty grueling for quite a while. Or in other cases it’s more just like, OK, let’s each have kind of like more of a focus.” (01:34:45)