How a Scottish moral philosopher got Elon’s number
When Elon Musk’s text messages were released as part of a court filing over his proposed purchase of Twitter, the world’s richest man was found to be corresponding with tech billionaires, fellow CEOs and bankers.
Tucked incongruously among those business leaders were messages from a Scottish moral philosopher.
The philosopher, William MacAskill, was acting as a go-between for billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who “has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing it and then making it better for the world,” he wrote in March, referring to Twitter.
MacAskill’s appearance in that batch of messages, along with TV appearances and magazine profiles, has contributed to a sense of his improbable sudden ubiquity. His latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a bestseller after it was published in August.
His rising profile parallels the growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen Z giving.
In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Bankman-Fried but also Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
“Advising billionaires on how to give away their money and encourage them to give more is definitely not where I saw my life going,” MacAskill, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, said in an interview. But he sees the utility in it, from the central effective altruist commandment of doing the most good possible.
At its core, effective altruism is devoted to the question of how one can do as much good as possible with the money and time available to them.
If the movement has an ur-text, it is Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972.
The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people dying elsewhere in the world, became a kind of “sleeper hit” in the past two decades, according to Julia Wise, community liaison at the Centre for Effective Altruism, which MacAskill helped found.
“When there was no Dustin and there was no Sam Bankman-Fried, I was once a major donor to the Centre for Effective Altruism as a social worker,” Wise said.
Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria.
As the title of his recent book suggests, MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.
The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them – like sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species.
Not everyone agrees with that shift. Joshua Pederson, who teaches ethics at Boston University, is among those who have been critical of the turn the community has taken.
“One of the downsides of effective altruism is this notion that you might be able to get the right answer,” Pederson said. “Then hubris enters the game or didacticism or preachiness, ‘You have given to the wrong charity.’”
MacAskill and Bankman-Fried’s relationship is an important piece in understanding the community’s evolution. The two men first met in 2012, when Bankman-Fried was a student at MIT with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
Over lunch, Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause.
Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.
The experiment with the young man’s career was, by any measure, a success. Bloomberg now estimates that Bankman-Fried is worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices.
Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.
Moskovitz and Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion since it was founded.
Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.
So it doesn’t need Musk, necessarily. But it wouldn’t mind him.
With an estimated $220 billion fortune, Musk could single-handedly make effective altruism the leading movement in philanthropy. Musk spoke at the EA Global conference in 2015, appearing on a panel about the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
MacAskill first met Musk at that conference, which is how his text messages eventually popped up in the legal wrangling over Twitter.
Bankman-Fried ultimately did not join Musk’s bid. “I don’t know exactly what Elon’s goals are going to be with Twitter,” Bankman-Fried said in the interview. “There was a little bit of ambiguity there.”
The Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way anyway, with Musk trying to back out before recently announcing his intention to follow through with it after all.
In August, Musk retweeted MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.”
Yet instead of embracing that endorsement, MacAskill posted a detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed – and many areas where he disagreed – with Musk.
For his part, MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misapprehensions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
