Open Philanthropy Is Neither

“Effective altruism” is the idea that you can calculate the payback on philanthropy, allowing you to give money only to projects with definite, calculable returns. It might mean not paying to grow and ship food to starving people if you think putting money toward a science fiction story about the Singularity is a better long-term investment — you know, something like one of the richest men in the world cutting USAID funding while another billionaire bolsters spending on AI to the benefit of Silicon Valley investors.

There’s an arrogance to the idea that anyone, much less Silicon Valley billionaires, can understand science and society so well that they can spend their money effectively, especially since most of its adherents got rich creating social media companies that seem to be most effective at destabilizing democracies, extracting value from creative works, and exploiting private information for profit.

• Because there is an underlying ROI behind effective altruism, public libraries probably wouldn’t have made the cut back in the days when the Robber Barons were trying to salvage their reputations by paying it forward.

A common structure for effective altruists is an LLC with non-profits or foundations (or both) below. This structure gives the owners a tax shelter for retained earnings in the non-profits while allowing them to transact for personal profit when it makes sense.

CZI LLC is one most relevant to this space, as it funds various things, most notably openRxiv. CZI LLC has an entire page of “initiatives.” These get sold off like assets from a for-profit — which makes sense, because that’s what CZI LLC is. One initiative was purchased in 2023, another in 2021, another in 2020, another in 2019, and yet another in 2019. The last one was worth $750 million in cash and stock.

There’s some real money to be made from effective altruism.

Another one of these arrangements recently made news, and it shares some elements CZI LLC has utilized.

On November 18th, one effective altruism group (Open Philanthropy) announced it was joining forces with another effective altruism group (Good Ventures) to form Coefficient Giving, yet another effective altruism group.

Using the term “philanthropy” is a little deceptive, however. Open Philanthropy was always topped by an LLC, as was Good Ventures. True to form, Coefficient Giving is also topped by an LLC. And all three are run by the same couple.