Sequoia Capital on how William MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried met

MacAskill was visiting MIT in search of volunteers willing to sign on to his earn-to-give program.  At a café table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MacAskill laid out his idea as if it were a business plan: a strategic investment with a return measured in human lives.  The opportunity was big, MacAskill argued, because, in the developing world, life was still unconscionably cheap.  Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death. 

MacAskill couldn’t have hoped for a better recruit.  Not only was SBF raised in the Bay Area as a utilitarian, but he’d already been inspired by Peter Singer to take moral action.  During his freshman year, SBF went vegan and organized a campaign against factory farming.  As a junior, he was wondering what to do with his life. And MacAskill—Singer’s philosophical heir—had the answer: The best way for him to maximize good in the world would be to maximize his wealth. 

SBF listened, nodding, as MacAskill made his pitch.  The earn-to-give logic was airtight.  It was, SBF realized, applied utilitarianism.  Knowing what he had to do, SBF simply said, “Yep. That makes sense.”  But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.  All the rest was merely execution risk.

~ "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex - And Maybe You Should Too," Sequoia Capital, September 22, 2022

(The account is based on an article by journalist Adam Fisher, commissioned by Sequoia.  The article, published last September, was posted on the firm's website under "We help the daring build legendary companies.”  It has since been removed.)

Naina Bajekal on William MacAskill's work on effective altruism

The greater good has been the focus of his work for more than a decade, since he helped start the effective altruism (EA) movement, which aims to use evidence and reason to find the best ways of helping others, and to put those findings into practice.  EA holds that we should value all lives equally and act on that basis.  It is the antithesis of the old do-gooder’s credo “Think global, act local.” 

His new book, What We Owe the Future, argues we should expand the moral circle even further: if we care about people thousands of miles away, we should care about people thousands or even millions of years in the future.  The book, which has been praised by the likes of Stephen Fry and Elon Musk, makes the case for “longtermism,” the view that positively influencing the long-term future—not just this generation or the next, but the potentially trillions of people still to come—is a key moral priority of our time.  Through analyzing the risks of climate change, man-made pathogens, nuclear weapons, and advanced artificial intelligence, MacAskill has come to believe we’re living at a pivotal moment in human history, one where the fate of the world depends significantly on the choices we make in our lifetimes.

~ Naina Bajekal, "Want To Do More Good? This Movement Might Have the Answer," Time, August 10, 2022