Some quick thoughts on this, cross-posted from a chat group, largely because I'm very confused by people's and organizations strong reactions to this announcement, and usually when I disagree with everyone in the EA community I find out I'm missing some important context.
If the concerns were about risks of misappropriation of donor funds, or anything object level, I would expect people to be more curios about what Ellison's role actually is, and what capital controls are in place, but nobody is asking about that, so my impression is that this is almost entirely about Ellison being unpopular and reputational concerns. If that is not the case I really don't understand why nobody is asking something like "What controls are in place to prevent Ellison, Austin, or anyone else, from stealing donations?". An organization like manifund should have systems in place to prevent anyone they hire (ex-convict or not) from stealing donor funds.
On reputational concerns, it's not clear to me that someone like Ellison (2 years at Jane Street, 3 times top 10% at the Putnam, very rich parents, ...) working on "improving technical infrastructure, operations and customer support, and posting newsletter updates" in a low-paid role at a small charity is that bad of a look. This is not an executive role, and it's not at Coefficient Giving or anything that large or core to EA.
I think a major problem in EA is the negative selection effects of all the most competent people working for Anthropic/METR/Coefficient Giving/... or starting their own orgs, and the talent left for organizations like Manifund is guaranteed to have them filtered out. Hiring someone like Ellison seems like a good (and potentially the only) chance for Manifund to get top talent while staying self-funded.
Several people heavily criticizing this contributed to mistakes that I think hurt the reputation of the EA community as much as FTX (e.g. in March 2023 Dustin Moskovitz wrote "My friends are less receptive to EA since the crisis, but it seems like it's because of multiple scandals/storylines from recent months, rather than FTX itself" ). At least one had terrible a reputation in their previous professional community. They are now leaders in EA, and I'm glad that the EA community decided not to fire/cancel them immediately (which could have been best for PR) but to allow them to contribute and learn from those mistakes, if EA moves to a movement even more obsessed with optics it will miss out on people like this and all the good they do.
Doing things for optics reasons and pretending it's not for optics reasons makes it harder for people to trust you and collaborate in the future.
They seem to have made a lot of money by investing in his fund, even after this week, so I find it hard to criticize them for it
Aschenbrenner didn't launch the fund alone, his cofounder Carl Shulman had previous experience managing money
We don't know the rest of their portfolio and how situational awareness fits into that (e.g. maybe it's partially a small hedge against AI making Stripe worthless, or who knows)
it is objectively nuts to put a 24-year-old with no experience in charge of a $50B hedge fund
That would indeed be nuts, but I think that's also clearly not what happened. My understanding is that he founded the fund himself, and he initially raised $100-200 million from a bunch of non-EA investors. See https://www.forourposterity.com/
Thanks to their spectacular returns they had a lot more assets under management, but my sense is that this is from normal investors who buy into the "AI is going to be big" thesis and were trying to make a profit.
I also found this article interesting, as well as the fact that Bloom Energy, IREN, Nebius, SanDisk, Micron, CoreWeave, and so on are up 10% to 30% since Wednesday
They certainly lost a lot of money in July and by being forced to sell, but per the WSJ Aschenbrenner wrote that the fund is still up 80% on the year.
The fund doesn't seem to be closing, and it looks like they weren't forced to sell their stake in Anthropic, so it's not clear to me how much of a failure or a success the project as a whole is so far.
If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you'll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted.
I don't think this is correct, you can mouseover the karma score of a post to see the number of votes. E.g. here it has 1 karma from 1 vote (the automatic self-vote that is given when you post) and no downvotes
I think these posts are either not being shown on the frontpage to most people, or don't get voted on before disappearing
Thank you for writing this comment. It made me realize that a main reason I feel uncomfortable talking about effective giving with the wealthiest people I know is that I implicitly worry they might decide to buy a mansion or a yacht, instead of saving thousands of children from death or poverty, depending on how exactly I phrase things. This is not particularly respectful towards them[1] and I'm going to think differently about this going forward, and try to respect their judgment and their character more, and have a lower bar for talking to them about effective giving.
But I want to push back as strongly as I can on this:
I’m left wondering whether part of the concern about cold outreach is that, when it does work, it allows organisations to bypass the existing intermediaries. Middlemen tend not to be enthusiastic about that.
I think it's valuable to flag potential conflicts of interest that might bias someone, and to flag self-promotion, but we should have a very high bar for imputing selfish intent.
Besides being against forum norms, I think these speculations about motives empirically have had significant negative consequences (three examples here), make cooperation harder, and discourage people from doing anything that can be perceived as self-serving (which includes many of the most impactful things someone can work on).
It might be a stretched example, but e.g. you mention in another comment that you had success doing cold outreach. I think it would be much more productive to discuss what makes cold outreach net-positive vs net-negative, and discuss your experience, compared to whether you're defending cold outreach out of personal interest.[2]
Some quick thoughts on this, cross-posted from a chat group, largely because I'm very confused by people's and organizations strong reactions to this announcement, and usually when I disagree with everyone in the EA community I find out I'm missing some important context.
It looks like https://www.youtube.com/@EffectiveAltruismOfficial (which used to be https://www.youtube.com/c/EffectiveAltruismVideos ) unlisted almost all of their videos, including e.g. Ajeya Cotra's classic introduction to EA
Does anyone know who to reach out to to ask if this was intentional?
The top six posts by karma of 2026 are all criticisms of EA, two of them of CEA explicitly
That would indeed be nuts, but I think that's also clearly not what happened. My understanding is that he founded the fund himself, and he initially raised $100-200 million from a bunch of non-EA investors. See https://www.forourposterity.com/
Thanks to their spectacular returns they had a lot more assets under management, but my sense is that this is from normal investors who buy into the "AI is going to be big" thesis and were trying to make a profit.
I also found this article interesting, as well as the fact that Bloom Energy, IREN, Nebius, SanDisk, Micron, CoreWeave, and so on are up 10% to 30% since Wednesday
They certainly lost a lot of money in July and by being forced to sell, but per the WSJ Aschenbrenner wrote that the fund is still up 80% on the year.
The fund doesn't seem to be closing, and it looks like they weren't forced to sell their stake in Anthropic, so it's not clear to me how much of a failure or a success the project as a whole is so far.
See also this from the Financial Times.
Edit: see also this tweet claiming to be the full letter Aschenbrenner sent to his LPs last night.
Moskovitz confirmed that they are "surging budgets in 2026 across all categories"
https://bsky.app/profile/moskov.goodventures.org/post/3mrdb7fhfqs2w
I expect (most of?) their grantmaking in other areas will be less public, but unprecedentedly massive.
E.g. Dustin Moskovitz is personally aiming to donate ~$5M to Lightcone Commons
They start with a self-strong-upvote, which depends on the user karma https://github.com/centre-for-effective-altruism/ea-forum/blob/27d24f53b7dce59b770040e6ac9ff05fcb9c4b16/src/lib/votes/voteHelpers.ts#L71-L91
I don't think this is correct, you can mouseover the karma score of a post to see the number of votes. E.g. here it has 1 karma from 1 vote (the automatic self-vote that is given when you post) and no downvotes
I think these posts are either not being shown on the frontpage to most people, or don't get voted on before disappearing
Thank you for writing this comment. It made me realize that a main reason I feel uncomfortable talking about effective giving with the wealthiest people I know is that I implicitly worry they might decide to buy a mansion or a yacht, instead of saving thousands of children from death or poverty, depending on how exactly I phrase things. This is not particularly respectful towards them[1] and I'm going to think differently about this going forward, and try to respect their judgment and their character more, and have a lower bar for talking to them about effective giving.
But I want to push back as strongly as I can on this:
I think it's valuable to flag potential conflicts of interest that might bias someone, and to flag self-promotion, but we should have a very high bar for imputing selfish intent.
Besides being against forum norms, I think these speculations about motives empirically have had significant negative consequences (three examples here), make cooperation harder, and discourage people from doing anything that can be perceived as self-serving (which includes many of the most impactful things someone can work on).
It might be a stretched example, but e.g. you mention in another comment that you had success doing cold outreach. I think it would be much more productive to discuss what makes cold outreach net-positive vs net-negative, and discuss your experience, compared to whether you're defending cold outreach out of personal interest.[2]
Although it might be correct, we're all human
Which to be clear I obviously don't think you are