Crypto whizzkid Sam Bankman-Fried has come a cropper. His $16 billion (£13 billion) fortune vanished overnight last week after FTX, the crypto exchange he founded, collapsed. What makes the tale of his rise and fall fascinating is that Bankman-Fried wasn’t in it for the money. Well, not in the normal way.
Bankman-Fried is (or was) the poster boy of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement: a group of rational philanthropists who use their time and money in the most efficient possible way. That might involve becoming a banker, or crypto king, in order to earn millions, or in this case billions, so that they can give it away. Bankman-Fried fell in with the EA crowd during his time studying physics at MIT, and decided to become a banker so he could ‘earn to give’. After a stint working at the Centre for Effective Altruism, he founded a crypto trading firm and then a crypto exchange.
As its power has grown, the vision of the EA movement has become vaguer and more contentious
His rise over the past decade reflects that of the EA movement, whose leading thinkers are endorsed by Elon Musk among others. But
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