Isn’t this a bit much hindsight? Conditional that you trust that nothing fraudulent is going on, you might just think “what route the money takes is an ops question that I leave to FTX ops staff to figure out” and not worry about it further. The only reason to get personally involved in insisting that the money flows a particular way seems like when you’re already suspicious that something might be really wrong?
What route the money takes (not in each individual case and in detail but in the high level) is clearly a question senior leadership should know and sign off, in particular in an organisation as small (in terms of number of staff) as the FTX Foundation. (I don’t even know if they had any ops staff, there is no-one listed here.)
No I think charities should ensure their grant funding goes via them, not via defunct phone stores. And if their ops folks can’t manage that I probably hold the charity leadership accountable.
Will was an unpaid adviser, right? While the extent of his involvement is unclear to me, it’s not obvious he in particular should have been expected to monitor the organization’s ops.
I suspect they were told at a high level that the payments were made through various entities for tax/accounting reasons and didn’t dig into the nature of each of those entities. Indeed, there almost certainly were good tax reasons to structure certain payments other than through the 501c3. I don’t think I would downgrade them for not independently investigating each of the grantor entities. There’s just no ex ante reason to think one of them would be a chain of defunct phone stores. . .
Isn’t this a bit much hindsight? Conditional that you trust that nothing fraudulent is going on, you might just think “what route the money takes is an ops question that I leave to FTX ops staff to figure out” and not worry about it further. The only reason to get personally involved in insisting that the money flows a particular way seems like when you’re already suspicious that something might be really wrong?
What route the money takes (not in each individual case and in detail but in the high level) is clearly a question senior leadership should know and sign off, in particular in an organisation as small (in terms of number of staff) as the FTX Foundation. (I don’t even know if they had any ops staff, there is no-one listed here.)
No I think charities should ensure their grant funding goes via them, not via defunct phone stores. And if their ops folks can’t manage that I probably hold the charity leadership accountable.
Happy to be wrong, but I’m pretty confident.
Will was an unpaid adviser, right? While the extent of his involvement is unclear to me, it’s not obvious he in particular should have been expected to monitor the organization’s ops.
I suspect they were told at a high level that the payments were made through various entities for tax/accounting reasons and didn’t dig into the nature of each of those entities. Indeed, there almost certainly were good tax reasons to structure certain payments other than through the 501c3. I don’t think I would downgrade them for not independently investigating each of the grantor entities. There’s just no ex ante reason to think one of them would be a chain of defunct phone stores. . .