FTX donated millions of dollars to an obscure organization for a real estate investment: the purchase of a centuries-old castle in Czechia. What need would a charitable movement have for a palatial property with a lake and a frisbee golf course? https://t.co/hRBbJXjxOi
— Forbes (@Forbes) March 2, 2023
fascinated by the EA forum discussions on why it was actually *very necessary* for them to buy country houses and castles.https://t.co/cfTT4Rh0ophttps://t.co/1LJdu5U06d
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 28, 2023
This is, of course, a new skin on a very old game — what J.K. Galbraith sarcastically called “Horse & Sparrow Theory“. At least its ‘Prosperity Gospel’ proponents during the First Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie and his peers, had the self-preservation instincts to endow public libraries and museums across America. Today’s smarm-grifters just swindle-stole a pleasant public venue in central Europe to use for their ‘conference center’. Not just crooked, but lame!
Four months before FTX collapsed into a multi-billion dollar catastrophe of doomed investments and shadowy subsidiaries, the crypto exchange donated millions of dollars to an obscure organization for a real estate investment: the purchase of a centuries-old castle in the scenic Czech highlands.
In July 2022, the $4.5 million gift was quietly bestowed by the FTX Foundation, the exchange’s philanthropic arm, and is one of dozens of donations now sitting in the crosshairs of the sprawling FTX bankruptcy proceedings.
The FTX Foundation does not appear to have disclosed the donation before it was shuttered in December. But according to Irena Kotikova, a former Czech Association for Effective Altruism chairperson who applied for the grant, the funds were disbursed last July to the European Summer Program on Rationality (ESPR), a Czech educational non-profit with ties to “effective altruism,” a social movement promoted by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Roughly $3.5 million was reportedly used to acquire Chateau Hostacov, “a renaissance chateau hidden away in the center of the Czech Republic.”
In its simplest form, effective altruism advocates doing the most good for as many people as possible. The philosophy nominally took shape around 2011, and encourages the use of evidence and reason to determine how to best save the world. To some adherents, this has meant “earning to give” — a sort of moral imperative for taking that Wall Street job, or running a multi-billion dollar crypto exchange (ideally not into the ground) in hopes of, say, safeguarding humanity against artificial intelligence or preventing a nuclear catastrophe. As Bankman-Fried once said: “I wanted to get rich not because I like money, but because I wanted to give that money to charity.” (A few months later he told the Wall Street Journal that his charitable efforts were “as much PR as anything else.”)
Late Night Open Thread: Effective (for Its Proponents) AltruismPost + Comments (87)