Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations. Since 2017, it has worked with another early and influential effective altruism organization, GiveWell, on Open Philanthropy, which is now the main vehicle for their funding.
Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.
So it doesn’t need Mr. Musk, necessarily. But it wouldn’t mind him.
With an estimated $220 billion fortune, Mr. Musk could single-handedly make effective altruism the leading movement in philanthropy. Mr. Musk spoke at the EA Global conference in 2015, appearing on a panel about the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.
That is how his text messages popped up among hundreds of others sent to Mr. Musk.
Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately did not join Mr. Musk’s bid. “I don’t know exactly what Elon’s goals are going to be with Twitter,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said in the interview. “There was a little bit of ambiguity there.”
He had his hands full in the months that followed as cryptocurrency prices crashed. The Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way, with Mr. Musk trying to back out before recently announcing his intention to follow through with it after all.
In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)
For his part, Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”
