Source: Nymag
Effective altruism lost its most visible funder and moral credibility when Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud was exposed. The movement's infrastructure—grant-making networks, research institutions, cause prioritization frameworks—remains intact and attractive to the next generation of tech wealth. The mechanics of wealth transfer matter: unlike SBF's rapid, ideologically-driven deployment of capital, AI IPO windfalls will flow to engineers and executives with different constraints and risk profiles, but potentially deeper belief in the movement's core premise that money can reduce existential risk. EA is shifting from crypto-adjacent movement to something closer to mainstream institutional philanthropy, which trades moral clarity for institutional staying power.