Attempting to frame this as MacAskill simply putting them in touch is fairly astonishing. From the texts alone:
MacAskill laid out monetary amounts for the offers of Bankman-Fried’s investment in Twitter.
He’s worth $24B, and his early employees (with shared values) bump that to $30B. I asked about how much he could in principle contribute and he said: “~$1-3b would be easy ~3-8b I could do ~$8-15b is maybe possible but would require financing.
Then, when Musk explicitly asked if he would vouch for Sam Bankman-Fried. MacAskill vouched for him enthusiastically, linking explicitly to SBF’s dedication to longtermism.
You vouch for him?
Very much so! Very dedicated to making the long-term future of humanity go well.
I do not understand how this can be characterised as just putting them in touch.
Many of the larger ambitions appear to rely on a common assumption: that at least the broad shape of consequences of actions are forseeable by this community, and forseeable on the time scale of centuries or longer.
Assuming its leaders are not complicit in the fraud, the community might reflect that they have been catastropically wrong on a time scale of weeks.