A charity tied to effective altruism—a movement that preaches doing the most good with as much money as you can get—has listed a $20 million mansion for sale, just months after being ordered to return a $26.8 million donation to victims of incarcerated crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried. The sale, first reported by The Telegraph, comes as the group’s British arm, Effective Ventures UK, is shutting down amid an investigation by a government charity commission.
This humiliating turn stems from the movement’s entanglement with the biggest financial fraud of the century and its drift toward delusional decadence fueled by the notion it must save future humans from existential threats like genocidal artificial super-intelligence—their favorite fixation.
The property in question, Wytham Abbey, is a 15th-century manor house in the rolling hills outside Oxford, England—a hub of effective altruism organizations and the place where the movement was founded in 2012 by two philosophers.
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In 2021, Effective Ventures acquired the building through a $23 million grant from Open Philanthropy, the charity of Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz—a high-profile effective altruist who has bankrolled the movement with hundreds of millions of dollars.
The stated purpose of the grant was “growing and empowering the EA community,” with the mansion set to become a mecca for an increasingly influential and powerful movement. Its adherents are filling key roles throughout the U.S. government, some of whose salaries are covered by Moskovitz—who recently met with President Biden to promote EA objectives around artificial intelligence.
A website for the drafty 25-bedroom mansion says it was “set up as a workshop venue for people, groups, or organizations to gather and lead people through reflecting and working on globally significant problems and puzzles.”
In late 2022, the purchase of Wytham Abbey started to get attention—first in a New Yorker profile on movement leader William MacAskill, later in the aftermath of the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda research.
The U.K. and U.S. arms of Effective Ventures had received large donations from Bankman-Fried, and MacAskill was credited with persuading Bankman-Fried to go into finance as a way to acquire as much wealth as possible to do “good.”
The price tag for the mansion obviously contradicted the movement's original stated goal of making sure every dollar spent has maximum positive impact on the world. It caused bad press and some internal dissent within effective altruist forums.
Effective altruist defector Émile P. Torres, who brought the purchase to wider attention on Twitter, said last week that it was “yet another example of how reducing ethics to number-crunching can “justify” virtually any purchase,” going on to note that MacAskill’s book, What We Owe the Future, launched at a New York City vegan restaurant with a $438-a-head tasting menu.
Others defended the purchase, including Jeffrey Ladish, head of AI insights for the Center for Humane Technology, who tweeted his annoyance at the backlash because “this is Manhattan Project level shit” with regards to avoiding existential risk from AI, and that the cost paled in comparison to saving humanity.
If paying a huge settlement and listing Wytham Abbey wasn’t humiliating enough for the effective altruists, their arch-nemesis, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who champions free and open source AI development, joked on April 1 that he was calling his realtor with regards to Wytham.
