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.”
