I disagree. I think the entire reason Dustin Moskovitz was able to begin liquidating and diversifying his Facebook/Meta stock is because Zuckerberg is holding down the fort as CEO and controlling shareholder with 58% voting rights. Zuckerberg assumed the fiduciary duty of actually running Meta to maximize shareholder return and even strategically got married the day after the Facebook IPO-just to make it super clear who was going to be in charge of the company. Dustin Moskovitz is also in a similar position at Asana.
Contrast that to FTX where Bankman-Fried was giving away company and shareholder money before FTX ever made any profit or even went public, and consequently EA suffered reputational damage and FTX fund recipients faced lawsuits and clawbacks from FTX shareholders and deposit holders.
Basically I think it can be a ….slippery slope-fiduciary duty wise, at least- asking billionaires that have an active role in running their companies to aggressively divest their shares for the sake of philanthropy.
I wasn’t saying anything about timing or financial / liquidity strategy Zuckerberg should use. Rather, my main point was that Zuckerberg shows no signs of being convinced that either he should take altruism seriously or that, in doing so, EA has a lot to offer.
I see where you’re coming from and you’re right. My point was, the actions of billionaire tech CEOs (and CEOs in general) tend to be put under a microscope by the public and news media merely because they are CEOs of influential companies. So most CEOs try not to do anything that invites more criticism or controversy. It’s true that EA tries to be ‘boringly effective’ and ‘verifiably high impact’. However, as of now EA is still a very niche social movement and it is emphatically not a ‘plain and boring philanthropic choice’ in the same way as donating to your local place of worship or the local YMCA is.
Zuckerberg has been mocked mercilessly for stupid things like ‘looking like an alien’ and ‘sweating during congressional testimony’. He gave a $75 million donation to a bay area hospital and got a building named after his Harvard-educated doctor wife -and he stillgot criticized. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative tried their best to toe the line and donate to ‘woke’ left wing causes and activists, and those activists once asked him to resign from his own charitable foundation. So now Zuckerberg is just doing zany-but-popular billionaire stuff like building a 7 foot tall statue of his wife or re-recording his favorite pop song. Of course I’m not saying that sort of thing is right or ‘moral’, but you can see Zuckerberg’s point of view from his actions.
Basically I think EA should become a boring thing like the YMCA, to be more impactful. Philanthropic interest and funding tends to be a feast-or-famine thing (hah) for some reason. So I think EA needs to be popular first, and then the billionaire funding may very well follow afterwards.
I agree with the general point that Zuckerberg is too committed to being Facebook boss to give much of his stock away now, but he and his wife put $2b in Facebook shares into his own foundation, which isn’t particularly EA inclined (either explicitly or broadly). That’s less than Moskovitz-Tuna from a bigger chunk of wealth but it’s non-trivial, and certainly enough to show he’s not taking his most of cues from them.
I don’t consider this to be any sort of failing on Dustin’s part (I don’t expect my bosses to listen to my donation philosophy if they 100x their current net worth either, even though they definitely have some points of agreement with me and trust my judgement on some things) and think the more salient question is “why have so few people that are not Mark Zuckerberg but are also vaguely in the orbit of EAers donated to EA causes compared with other causes”
As for SBF, his “Future Fund” was less than FTX committed to stadium sponsorship, so I don’t think the desire to top that up can be blamed for his recklessness (even if the broader conceit that everything he did was for the greater good was). It’s absolutely possible to give significant amounts to philanthropic causes (EA or otherwise) and retain control of a business without being Sam.
I disagree. I think the entire reason Dustin Moskovitz was able to begin liquidating and diversifying his Facebook/Meta stock is because Zuckerberg is holding down the fort as CEO and controlling shareholder with 58% voting rights. Zuckerberg assumed the fiduciary duty of actually running Meta to maximize shareholder return and even strategically got married the day after the Facebook IPO-just to make it super clear who was going to be in charge of the company. Dustin Moskovitz is also in a similar position at Asana.
Contrast that to FTX where Bankman-Fried was giving away company and shareholder money before FTX ever made any profit or even went public, and consequently EA suffered reputational damage and FTX fund recipients faced lawsuits and clawbacks from FTX shareholders and deposit holders.
Basically I think it can be a ….slippery slope-fiduciary duty wise, at least- asking billionaires that have an active role in running their companies to aggressively divest their shares for the sake of philanthropy.
I wasn’t saying anything about timing or financial / liquidity strategy Zuckerberg should use. Rather, my main point was that Zuckerberg shows no signs of being convinced that either he should take altruism seriously or that, in doing so, EA has a lot to offer.
I see where you’re coming from and you’re right. My point was, the actions of billionaire tech CEOs (and CEOs in general) tend to be put under a microscope by the public and news media merely because they are CEOs of influential companies. So most CEOs try not to do anything that invites more criticism or controversy. It’s true that EA tries to be ‘boringly effective’ and ‘verifiably high impact’. However, as of now EA is still a very niche social movement and it is emphatically not a ‘plain and boring philanthropic choice’ in the same way as donating to your local place of worship or the local YMCA is.
Zuckerberg has been mocked mercilessly for stupid things like ‘looking like an alien’ and ‘sweating during congressional testimony’. He gave a $75 million donation to a bay area hospital and got a building named after his Harvard-educated doctor wife -and he still got criticized. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative tried their best to toe the line and donate to ‘woke’ left wing causes and activists, and those activists once asked him to resign from his own charitable foundation. So now Zuckerberg is just doing zany-but-popular billionaire stuff like building a 7 foot tall statue of his wife or re-recording his favorite pop song. Of course I’m not saying that sort of thing is right or ‘moral’, but you can see Zuckerberg’s point of view from his actions.
For that matter even Moskovitz sometimes gets the Zuckerberg treatment on this forum itself, and can’t just be a donor giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Instead the guy has to politely tiptoe around people’s sentiments while worrying about risks to both EA and his day job as CEO of another multi-billion dollar company. So I wonder if EA is really appealing as a philanthropic choice to other billionaires.
Basically I think EA should become a boring thing like the YMCA, to be more impactful. Philanthropic interest and funding tends to be a feast-or-famine thing (hah) for some reason. So I think EA needs to be popular first, and then the billionaire funding may very well follow afterwards.
I agree with the general point that Zuckerberg is too committed to being Facebook boss to give much of his stock away now, but he and his wife put $2b in Facebook shares into his own foundation, which isn’t particularly EA inclined (either explicitly or broadly). That’s less than Moskovitz-Tuna from a bigger chunk of wealth but it’s non-trivial, and certainly enough to show he’s not taking his most of cues from them.
I don’t consider this to be any sort of failing on Dustin’s part (I don’t expect my bosses to listen to my donation philosophy if they 100x their current net worth either, even though they definitely have some points of agreement with me and trust my judgement on some things) and think the more salient question is “why have so few people that are not Mark Zuckerberg but are also vaguely in the orbit of EAers donated to EA causes compared with other causes”
As for SBF, his “Future Fund” was less than FTX committed to stadium sponsorship, so I don’t think the desire to top that up can be blamed for his recklessness (even if the broader conceit that everything he did was for the greater good was). It’s absolutely possible to give significant amounts to philanthropic causes (EA or otherwise) and retain control of a business without being Sam.
I think you’re asking the right question. I’ve tried to answer that in my reply to Trappist here.