Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: FTX Does Some Effective Altruism

“The” vs. “a”

Remember FTX? It was wild. FTX was a crypto exchange that collapsed in bankruptcy and fraud charges in late 2022. Before that, though, it was a wildly lucrative business, run sloppily by inexperienced young people out of luxury apartments in the Bahamas, with a distinctive charitable mission. FTX was associated with the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was explicitly looking to earn a lot of money to give to effective charities. I once said to him that he was “in the business of funneling money from people who are going to use it poorly ...