How much would you say you donated to political and nonprofit causes over, say, the last two years?
I want to say a few hundred million.
$200, $300 million?
Something in that ballpark. That’s not counting for-profit investments.
Can you confidently say, for the record, that there was no financial impropriety on the political and philanthropic side of your work?
I don’t believe there was any. I don’t think there’s any. And obviously I’m not omniscient, but I don’t think there was any.
You often talk about the philanthropic stuff you’ve done as separate from FTX. But do you think “earn to give,” your motto, and part of the effective altruism credo, encouraged you to take risks? To do whatever you needed to do to “earn” enough to spend $1 billion, for instance, on the 2024 election?
You can imagine a world in which there is a trade-off like that, but in practice, very few things are as large in a positive direction as the biggest negatives are in the negative direction.
I was absolutely willing to risk the business not growing, or some of my personal money, for an opportunity and a chance at being able to do a lot more. But if you look at what ended up happening, it’s incredibly bad. And it undermines the good that I was trying to do, and it’s just a really, really bad outcome.
But did your effort to earn as much as possible—to grow FTX and grow Alameda as much as possible—cause you to ignore warnings or not put up guardrails?
What it feels to me is that it’s not like I did some “rational calculus” where you say it made sense to have substantially riskier behavior or anything like that. And that this was a known, accepted, 10 percent outcome and that was worth the risk. That’s not what it felt like, and I don’t think that’s what it was. Because even a 10 percent chance of this would be very bad.
What it felt like was that I got less grounded; I got some version of the ailment that I had prided myself on not falling to. That I felt like I saw a lot of other companies and leaders and was something that sort of made us stand apart. And obviously, I wasn’t as immune to that as I’d like to think I was.
By summer 2022, I was spending a quarter of my time on policy in D.C. I was spending a quarter of my time on branding. I was spending a quarter of my time on people management. And that’s three quarters of my time right there. And that’s three quarters of my time and energy and effort that were not being spent on, What’s actually fucking going on? That was true in terms of risk management, which was a huge fucking area, a huge important area that I didn’t give much thought to.
When you talk about your mistakes, you talk about your intent. Your mother once described you as a “take-no-prisoners utilitarian.” Shouldn’t your intent be irrelevant?
Except to the extent that it’s predictive of the future. But yeah, at the end of the day, I do think that, what happened happened, and whatever I was thinking or not thinking or trying to do or not trying to do, it happened. And that sucks. That’s really bad. A lot of people got hurt. And I think that, thinking about why it happened, there are some perspectives from which it matters, including trying to figure out what to do going forward. But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened. And as you said, I’m not expecting people to say, Oh, that’s all good then. Sam didn’t intend for me to lose money. I don’t miss that money anymore. That’s not how it works.
One of your close personal mentors, the effective altruism philosopher Will McCaskill, has disavowed you. Have you talked with him since?
I haven’t talked with him. [Five second pause.] I don’t blame him. [20-second pause and false starts.] I feel incredibly bad about the impact of this on E.A. and on him, and more generally on all of the things I had been wanting to support. At the end of the day, this isn’t any of their faults.
This fucked up a lot of their plans, and a lot of plans that people had to do a lot of good for the world. And that’s terrible. And to your point, from a consequentialist perspective, what happened was really bad. And independent of intent or of anything like that, it’s still really bad.
Have you talked with your brother Gabe, who ran your Guarding Against Pandemics group? Are you worried, frankly, that you might have ruined his career too?
It doesn’t feel good either. Like, none of these things feel good.
Have you apologized to him?
Yeah, I spent a lot of last month apologizing, but I don’t know how much the apologies mean to people at the end of the day. Because what happened happened, and it’s cold comfort in a lot of ways.
I don’t want to put words in his mouth. I feel terrible about what happened to all the things he’s trying to do. He’s family, and he’s been supportive even when he didn’t have to be. But I don’t know what’s going through his head from his perspective, and I don’t want to put words in it.
Do you think someone like you deserves to go to jail? On a moral level, doesn’t someone who has inflicted so much pain—intent be damned—deserve it? There are a lot of people incarcerated in this country for far less.
What happens happens. That’s not up to me.
I can tell you what I think personally, viscerally, and morally feels right to me. Which is that I feel like I have a duty to sort of spend the rest of my life doing what I can to try and make things right as I can.
You shocked a lot of people when you referred in a recent interview to the “dumb game that we woke Westerners play.” My understanding is that you were talking about corporate social responsibility and E.S.G., not about effective altruism, right?
That’s right.
To what extent do you feel your image and donations gave you cover? I know you say you didn’t do anything wrong intentionally. But I wonder how much you were in on the joke.
Gave me cover to do what, though? I think what I was in on, so to speak, was that a lot of the C.S.R. stuff was bullshit. Half of that was always just branding, and I think that’s true for most companies. And to some extent everyone knew, but it was a game everyone played together. And it’s a dumb game.