According to the criminal indictment filed by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York, and also the civil complaints filed by the SEC and the CFTC: FTX/Alameda was a criminal fraud enterprise from inception. FTX embezzled its customers’ money.
Those who received grants from FTX received stolen money. It’s not only a matter of bankruptcy potentially clawing the money back; now if a grantee is holding unspent funds they are holding criminal proceeds. (And don’t rush to spend the funds; since the date FTX filed for bankruptcy, grant recipients were on notice of this possibility.)
This presents a real world ethical problem for those grantees. Do they return the criminal funds they received? Or do they cast themselves as victims and rationalize they are somehow entitled to keep the money they now know was stolen?
When I posted earlier that grantees should return the unspent funds there was a lot of strained arguing that returning the money was not required. This was eyebrow-raising coming from a group that uses “ethical” in its name.
If you received a grant from FTX then you received stolen money from a criminal fraudster. It would be asking too much to return money already spent before FTX filed for bankruptcy. But what about the unspent money? Are people going to voluntarily return that unspent money to the FTX bankruptcy estate? Or is ethics only something to preach to others, but to avoid when it impacts your own money?
Or is ethics only something to preach to others, but to avoid when it impacts your own money?
To be clear, even ignoring that I’ve lost most of my net worth on FTX, I’ve donated 10-20% of my income since 2015, I was an unpaid volunteer for many months in 2017 and 2020, and relative to my past FAANG job, I took substantially greater than a 50% paycut because I think my current job is morally important enough. This isn’t much relative to the rest of this community; I’m sure many EAs made larger sacrifices to live in accordance with their ethical values. In many ways I fall short of my ethical ideals, but what have you done?
Or is ethics only something to preach to others, but to avoid when it impacts your own money?
You say this as if the EA community has made a habit of policing the ethics of the sources of other people’s funding. But whenever people have demanded non-EA charitable organizations to relinquish money from the villain of the year, e.g. Jimmy Saville or the Sackler family, I have always thought that was silly, and I suspect other EAs tend to agree.
According to the criminal indictment filed by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York, and also the civil complaints filed by the SEC and the CFTC: FTX/Alameda was a criminal fraud enterprise from inception. FTX embezzled its customers’ money.
Those who received grants from FTX received stolen money. It’s not only a matter of bankruptcy potentially clawing the money back; now if a grantee is holding unspent funds they are holding criminal proceeds. (And don’t rush to spend the funds; since the date FTX filed for bankruptcy, grant recipients were on notice of this possibility.)
This presents a real world ethical problem for those grantees. Do they return the criminal funds they received? Or do they cast themselves as victims and rationalize they are somehow entitled to keep the money they now know was stolen?
When I posted earlier that grantees should return the unspent funds there was a lot of strained arguing that returning the money was not required. This was eyebrow-raising coming from a group that uses “ethical” in its name.
If you received a grant from FTX then you received stolen money from a criminal fraudster. It would be asking too much to return money already spent before FTX filed for bankruptcy. But what about the unspent money? Are people going to voluntarily return that unspent money to the FTX bankruptcy estate? Or is ethics only something to preach to others, but to avoid when it impacts your own money?
To be clear, even ignoring that I’ve lost most of my net worth on FTX, I’ve donated 10-20% of my income since 2015, I was an unpaid volunteer for many months in 2017 and 2020, and relative to my past FAANG job, I took substantially greater than a 50% paycut because I think my current job is morally important enough. This isn’t much relative to the rest of this community; I’m sure many EAs made larger sacrifices to live in accordance with their ethical values. In many ways I fall short of my ethical ideals, but what have you done?
Not everyone has the same ethical beliefs.
You say this as if the EA community has made a habit of policing the ethics of the sources of other people’s funding. But whenever people have demanded non-EA charitable organizations to relinquish money from the villain of the year, e.g. Jimmy Saville or the Sackler family, I have always thought that was silly, and I suspect other EAs tend to agree.