Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

It occurred to Nishad that the effective altruist’s relationship to money was more than a little bizarre. Basically all of Alameda Research’s employees and investors were committed to giving all their money away to roughly the same charitable causes. You might surmise that they wouldn’t much care who wound up with the money, as it all would go to saving the lives of the same people none of them would ever meet. You would be wrong: in their financial dealings with each other, the effective altruists were more ruthless than Russian oligarchs. Their investors were charging them a rate of interest of 50 percent. “It wasn’t a normal loan,” said Nishad. “It was a shark loan.” In what was meant to be a collaborative enterprise, Sam had refused to share any equity with anyone. And now all these unprofitable effective altruists were demanding to be paid millions to quit—and doing whatever they could to trash Sam’s reputation with the outside world until they got their money. “It felt super weird,” said Nishad. “It felt wild for money to be the object of our focus rather than something else. I thought caring about money itself was morally bankrupt.”