I just read Going Infinite, a Michael Lewis love letter to a crypto criminal named Sam Bankman-Fried. TL;dr if you rob a bank, bet it all on black and win, YOU STILL ROBBED THE DAMN BANK.
Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite tells the story of the rise and collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried, but it misses the most important part: how the philosophical machinery of Effective Altruism (EA) helped rationalize the behavior that led to the crime.
This isn’t a claim that EA “caused” fraud.
It’s a simpler, harsher truth:
EA’s internal logic makes it dangerously easy to justify unethical — even illegal — actions when the expected future payoff looks big enough.
Lewis captures the eccentricities, the empire-building, and the implosion. What he fails to confront is the moral permission structure surrounding SBF: the way EA’s ends-justify-the-means reasoning, its obsession with maximizing future value, and its reverence for high-risk “longtermist” bets created a worldview where skipping ethical constraints didn’t just feel acceptable — it felt optimal.
And once you follow where SBF’s money actually went, you see how deeply that logic shaped his giving. The vast majority didn’t fund global health or poverty alleviation. It funded EA itself — its institutions, its recruiters, its meta-organizations, and its internal growth engine.
This is the part of the story Lewis didn’t write.
But it’s the part we need to understand.
Below is the part of the story Michael Lewis didn’t tell: the mechanics of how the money was routed, why so much of it flowed into EA meta-infrastructure, and what it reveals about the movement’s ends-justify-the-means drift.
1. The Pipes: How SBF’s Philanthropy Actually Moved
SBF’s philanthropic network was built on three main channels:
1. FTX Foundation / FTX Philanthropy, Inc.
A Delaware nonprofit entity created in 2022 to house FTX’s philanthropic work.
2. The FTX Future Fund (inside the Foundation)
Officially launched in early 2022 to give away hundreds of millions annually to “improve humanity’s long-term prospects.”
By mid-June 2022, it had already committed $132M across 262 grants.
3. Direct routing to Effective Ventures (EV)
EV — the umbrella organization that contains the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, and others — received $26.8M from FTX-related entities, ultimately all repaid in bankruptcy.
These were not random, unconnected donations. They formed a coordinated pipeline that channeled SBF’s money into EA organizations, EA career-building, EA content, EA infrastructure, and EA-aligned grantmaking bodies.
2. The Future Fund’s Real Allocation: EA Meta ≫ EA Causes
The Future Fund published a breakdown of its $132M in grants through mid-2022. The numbers are revealing:
FTX Future Fund Allocations (mid-2022):
- Artificial Intelligence: $20M
- Biorisk & catastrophe preparedness: $30M
- Economic Growth: $7M
- Effective Altruism (movement itself): $34M
- “Empowering Exceptional People”: $10M
- Epistemic Institutions: $8M
- Additional amounts to longtermism, great-power relations, and meta-governance.
That $34M line item — “Effective Altruism” — is funding for EA as a cause area, not downstream interventions.
This alone means over one quarter of disbursed funds went into growing EA, not helping people directly.
But the real picture is even more lopsided once you examine the grant details.
3. The Routing: Where the EA-Directed Money Actually Went
Once you follow the grants, a clear pattern appears: EA was both the philosophical frame and the primary recipient.
3.1 Effective Ventures / CEA Cluster
EV disclosed that FTX-related entities donated $26.8M in 2022 across its UK and US arms.
This included a $13.9M Future Fund grant to CEA.
These funds supported:
- EA global coordination
- university fellowships
- outreach programs
- recruitment pipelines
- movement strategy
- internal EA infrastructure
- the purchase and operation of Wytham Abbey (later sold to repay the FTX estate)
In other words: pure movement-building.
3.2 Longview Philanthropy (Longtermist Meta Fund)
The Future Fund awarded $15M to Longview Philanthropy to serve as an EA-aligned allocative body.
This is effectively EA infrastructure funding channeled through another EA-run intermediary.
3.3 EA Content, Prizes, and Career Pipelines
Examples include:
- $900k Effective Ideas Blog Prize
- $100k EA Critiques & Red Teaming Prize
- $700k+ to Giving What We Can
- Funding for Rethink Priorities, High Impact Professionals, Charity Entrepreneurship, High Impact Athletes, and other EA-movement orgs.
These grants focused on expanding EA’s intellectual reach, career conversion funnels, and brand footprint.
3.4 The Regrantor System: EA Insiders Allocating EA Money
The Future Fund’s “regrantor” model gave more than 100 EA-aligned individuals six- and seven-figure budgets with extremely light constraints.
The people allocating SBF’s money were overwhelmingly EA insiders. And their grants overwhelmingly went to EA-aligned projects.
This wasn’t corruption. It was design.
EA trusted EA to grow EA.
4. The Core Rot: Why EA Became the Primary Recipient
The flow of money reveals something essential about EA’s deeper incentives:
EA’s model rewards abstraction over action.
Inside EA’s moral calculus:
- Saving 10,000 lives through global health earns X “impact.”
- But recruiting donors who might save 100,000 future lives earns 10X.
- So the most “effective” action becomes… growing EA.
This leads to a set of predictable distortions:
1. Movement-building outranks direct help.
Recruiting a Stanford freshman becomes “high impact.”
Funding maternal health becomes “lower impact.”
2. The movement measures itself by future potential, not present results.
SBF wasn’t praised for what he funded.
He was praised for what he might fund — billions later.
3. EA becomes a self-referential moral engine.
The best donation is to EA itself, so EA can create more EAs, who will give more to EA, to create more EAs…
This is how a philosophy drifts into multi-level moral marketing without ever meaning to.
The dollar flows reflect the logic perfectly:
- $34M to “Effective Altruism”
- $15M to Longview
- $26.8M to Effective Ventures
- Millions more across EA prizes, EA content, EA research, EA careers, and EA recruitment
SBF didn’t hijack EA.
EA’s internal value system made SBF’s routing rational.
5. The Missing Chapter of Going Infinite
Michael Lewis told the human story, but he missed the moral one.
The book never confronts the philosophy that gave SBF permission to rationalize catastrophic decisions.
EA didn’t cause fraud.
But EA did create a framework where:
- future impact outranks present ethics
- recruitment outranks real-world interventions
- insider networks allocate insider money
- movement expansion is treated as world-saving
- ends justify means when the expected value is large enough
When your richest disciple follows that logic to its extreme, you shouldn’t be surprised when he sacrifices legality, integrity, and transparency to maximize impact “later.”
SBF was not an aberration of EA.
He was EA’s most logical, unrestrained output.
And the routing of his donations — the infrastructure he built, the incentives he embraced, the orgs he fortified — is the clearest window into the movement’s core vulnerability:
A philosophy built on maximizing future value can drift into maximizing itself.
That is the part Going Infinite didn’t write.
But it’s the part that matters most.
Why you should care about EA
- Multi-Level Marketing can grow very effectively. This viral component of EA all but guarantees more will follow
- In a Whole Whale Charity AI Brand Footprint study we saw the initial influences of EA on AI results.
- I am going to write that point again because you’re going to realize how important this tiny little bullet point is in a few years:
AI is becoming the largest, most influential philanthropic advisor in the world. AI is exhibiting many EA narrative traits in its reasoning based on our initial study.
