The do-gooder movement that shielded Sam Bankman-Fried from scrutiny

When FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a junior at MIT, he met William MacAskill, one of the founders of effective altruism, a philosophical movement that believes rationality is key to doing maximum good in the world.

For more than a decade, the EA community, as it’s known, has attracted bright young students from elite colleges like Oxford and Stanford, encouraging them to take lucrative jobs in finance and tech so they can amass wealth and donate it to efficient charities. EA’s emphasis on measurable impact has attracted billionaire tech philanthropists like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who helped finance a tightknit web of nonprofits and academic institutes to grow the movement even as its priorities shifted from helping the world’s poor to combating more theoretical risks, such as the rise of a hostile advanced artificial intelligence.