We were shocked and immensely saddened to learn of the recent events at FTX. Our hearts go out to the thousands of FTX customers whose finances may have been jeopardized or destroyed.
We are now unable to perform our work or process grants, and we have fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of the business operations that were funding the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund. As a result, we resigned earlier today.
We don’t yet have a full picture of what went wrong, and we are following the news online as it unfolds. But to the extent that the leadership of FTX may have engaged in deception or dishonesty, we condemn that behavior in the strongest possible terms. We believe that being a good actor in the world means striving to act with honesty and integrity.
We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor. We are so sorry that it has come to this. We are no longer employed by the Future Fund, but, in our personal capacities, we are exploring ways to help with this awful situation. We joined the Future Fund to support incredible people and projects, and this outcome is heartbreaking to us.
We appreciate the grantees' work to help build a better future, and we have been honored to support it. We're sorry that we won't be able to continue to do so going forward, and we deeply regret the difficult, painful, and stressful position that many of you are now in.
To reach us, grantees may email grantee-reachout@googlegroups.com. We know grantees must have many questions, and in our personal capacities we will try to answer them as best as we can given the circumstances.
Nick Beckstead
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Avital Balwit
Ketan Ramakrishnan
Will MacAskill
I'd regard incentive to discount highly immoral business practices (e.g. what happened with Alameda in 2018) as stemming from a conflict of interest (i.e. interest 1: promote integrity in EA; interest 2: get lots of money from SBF for EA. These were in conflict!)