By Emma Cowing
BAcK in 2017, Nicola Sturgeon had dinner with a young Scottish academic named William MacAskill. Bespectacled, softly spoken, wearing his regular uniform of tweed jacket and no tie, the 30-year-old Oxford philosophy professor might have seemed an odd choice of dining companion for the First Minister.
But while relatively unknown at home, MacAskill was rapidly becoming a star in the sleek, manicured streets of Silicon Valley. His philanthropic idea – that it is good to make as much money as possible, as long as you give most of it away to charitable causes – was attracting the praise of billionaires such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with an estimated fortune of $182billion (£150billion).
While still in his twenties MacAskill had been consulted by organisations as diverse as Oxfam and the World Bank, and the previous year had given a seminar in San Francisco with cari Tuna, wife of Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook whose net worth is more than $11billion (£9.1billion). His nickname among the california tech elite was ‘the wallet whisperer’. No wonder Sturgeon was demanding an audience.
Over dinner, the First Minister asked MacAskill to pitch her one policy which would make a tangible difference. He told her to plan for a pandemic.
Five years on and MacAskill, along with his philanthropic movement – named effective altruism – has become so revered by the world’s billionaires that earlier this year it was revealed the Scot had tried to broker a deal between Musk and cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried over the purchase of Twitter.
He has graced the cover of Time magazine, been the subject of glowing profiles in the New
Yorker and the New York Times, and appeared as a guest on the US chat show The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Quite the dizzying media profile for a former Glasgow private school pupil who once confessed he would order tap water at his local pub, then top up his glass with a can of 2 per cent lager bought from the corner shop.
Earlier this month, however, the clairvoyance skills which saw MacAskill warn Sturgeon to plan for an impending pandemic (advice, one must presume, the First Minister did not take), finally failed him.
On November 8, his friend and collaborator Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas-based crypto currency exchange FTX, one of the world’s largest, collapsed into bankruptcy amid federal investigations and accusations of fraud.
MacAskill has known Bankman-Fried since 2012, when the two met for lunch and MacAskill told him that he should go into business if he wanted to donate to charity in a meaningful way. Bankman-Fried took his advice, working on Wall Street before launching FTX in 2019 and, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, turning it into a multi-billion dollar currency exchange.
He took MacAskill along for the ride, too. The Scot sat on the board of FTX’s philanthropic arm in an unpaid role and was seen as the high-profile architect behind Bankman-Fried’s corporate philosophies. Now, FTX’s fall from grace could permanently tarnish his glossy, high-minded brand.
Such is the scale of the FTX collapse that lawyer John J Ray III, who oversaw the break-up of scandal-hit oil firm Enron and has now taken the reins at FTX, which at its peak was worth $32billion (£26.5billion), said that he had never in his career ‘seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here’.
Given that just months ago MacAskill personally vouched for Bankman-Fried to Musk by describing him as ‘very dedicated to making the long-term future of humanity go well’ it is not, as they might say, a good look.
Three days after FTX’s collapse, amid rumours that Bankman-Fried had been stopped on the tarmac at Nassau airport in the Bahamas attempting to board a plane for Dubai, a place with no extradition treaty with the US, MacAskill took to Twitter to pen a long mea culpa.
‘If FTX misused customer funds, then I personally will have much to reflect on,’ he tweeted. ‘Sam and FTX had a lot of goodwill – and some of that goodwill was the result of association with ideas I have spent my career promoting. If that goodwill laundered fraud, I am ashamed.’
SINcE then MacAskill has gone to ground, and did not respond to the Mail’s request for comment. But how did a Hutchesons’ Grammar pupil wind up becoming a poster boy for the Silicon Valley elite?
‘Advising billionaires on how to give away their money and encourage them to give more is definitely not where I saw my life going,’ MacAskill told The New York Times last month. Yet a glance at his career so far suggests it might just have been the plan all along.
MacAskill was born William crouch in Glasgow in 1987 (he later took his now ex-wife’s grandmother’s surname as his own) and was top of the class at ‘Hutchie’, the esteemed private school he attended in Glasgow’s South Side. Even as a teenager he demonstrated what one interviewer described as a ‘precocious moral zeal’, volunteering for a disabled Scout group and working at a care home for the elderly, much to the bemusement of his mother and father, who worked for the NHS and in IT respectively.
At the age of 15 he became aware of the Aids epidemic and, shocked at how many sufferers were dying, pledged to become a successful novelist so he could give away half his earnings.
There were eyebrows raised at Hutchie when he elected to study philosophy at cambridge rather than head down one of the more well-trodden paths for bright students such as law or medicine. As the parent of one school friend was heard to remark: ‘Philosophy. What a waste. That boy could have cured cancer.’
However, MacAskill flourished at cambridge – he was even, briefly, a saxophonist in a campus funk band – and says his life changed at the age of 18 when he read an essay by the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer which advocated giving almost everything away to help those worse off than yourself. MacAskill began ordering water at the pub, baking his own bread and was, by his own admission, ‘very annoying’.
A postgraduate degree at Oxford followed (while studying he supplemented his income, much of which he gave away, ‘with nude modelling for life-drawing classes’), before he embarked on a PhD which involved a year at Princeton in the US as a Fulbright Scholar.
By the time he received his doctorate in 2014 he had co-founded an organisation called Giving What We can, which encouraged people to pledge 10 per cent of their income to effective charities, as well as the centre for Effective Altruism, which pitched its purpose as providing advice on how to use your career to do good in the wider world.
At its heart, effective altruism is the
premise of encouraging individuals to make as much money as they can, in order to give the vast majority of it away to better humanity at large.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and worth $124billion (£102.6billion), is a classic proponent of the philosophy: just this month he announced he planned to give most of his fortune away during his lifetime.
MacAskill, too, embodies the philosophy he peddles, living on a personal budget of £26,000 per year, giving away a hefty percentage of his earnings and sharing a terraced house with two flatmates in an unfashionable part of Oxford.
He is also a believer in men taking their wives’ surnames, and when he married his girlfriend, a fellow academic named Amanda Askell, they made the curious decision to plump for her grandmother’s maiden name, which MacAskill chose to retain when the pair divorced several years later.
The publication of MacAskill’s first book, Doing Good Better, in 2015, which expands on the effective altruism theory, propelled him into the Silicon Valley stratosphere. Bill Gates described him as ‘a data nerd after my own heart’ while Steven Levitt, who coauthored the economics bestseller Freakonomics, declared it was required reading for ‘anyone interested in making the world better’. Bankman-Fried was another ardent fan.
Bankman-Fried, whose personal wealth was once valued at $24billion (£19.9billion), first came across MacAskill in 2012, when the Scot was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to give a talk about effective altruism. An MIT student and computer games fanatic who was troubled by animal welfare issues, Bankman-Fried was intrigued by the bespectacled young Scot, and the pair had lunch.
MacAskill suggested that Bankman-Fried would do more good helping animal welfare by becoming a high earner and donating money to the cause than by going to work for a charity. BankmanFried, who has since described the lunch as life-changing, agreed.
After graduation he went to work on Wall Street and in 2019 founded FTX, quickly bringing MacAskill on board in an unpaid advisory role and promoting his company’s dedication to effective altruism with high-profile donations to worthy causes.
FTX grew so quickly, and netted Bankman-Fried so much money, that he was the second-biggest donor to the Democratic Party during this year’s US midterm elections (beaten only by billionaire financier George Soros), and was happily declaring that $1billion (£826million) would be a ‘soft ceiling’ for his spending during the 2024 presidential election.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that at 8.12am on March 29 this year, Musk’s mobile pinged with a text message from MacAskill, inquiring whether he would like to be connected with Bankman-Fried, claiming the 29-year-old was ‘potentially interested in purchasing [Twitter] and then making it better for the world’.
‘Does he have huge amounts of money?’ Musk responded with characteristic bluntness.
‘Depends on how you define “huge”!’ MacAskill answered, explaining that Bankman-Fried was worth $24billion (£19.9billion). ‘[He’s] very dedicated to making the long-term future of humanity go well,’ he added.
The discussion came to nothing – Musk eventually bought Twitter himself in a widely publicised $44billion (£36.4billion) deal, and the texts were released as part of a court filing over his proposed purchase of the social media platform – but it gave an insight into the influence MacAskill now wielded.
WHen MacAskill’s second book, What We Owe the Future, hit the shelves in August, it became an instant bestseller. Musk was one of the first to weigh in, recommending his followers read it and declaring: ‘This is a close match for my philosophy.’ MacAskill, perhaps a little pompously, told The new York Times: ‘If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and AI [artificial intelligence] safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do.’ While the scale of the FTX collapse is still being assessed, its high-profile crash and burn has tarnished not just MacAskill but effective altruism itself. Many of the American media outlets who had previously lauded MacAskill are now questioning whether effective altruism was quite as effective as it first appeared. In the past few days it has been described as ‘a shaky moral framework’ and ‘bunk’, while one publication asked whether the movement had ‘lost its moral compass’.
Another US business commentator savvily remarked: ‘There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to laundering wrongdoing through conspicuous displays of spiritual piety or good works.’
MacAskill, meanwhile, appears to be devastated.
‘I had put my trust in Sam, and if he lied and misused customer funds he betrayed me, just as he betrayed his customers, his employees, his investors, & the communities he was a part of,’ he tweeted.
earlier this year, reflecting on that sage 2017 advice he gave to Miss Sturgeon, MacAskill reflected: ‘People were laughing about pandemics like a speculative fact, not something we should really be concerned about.
‘Like, then what happened? People were not paying attention to nuclear war and now there’s a very serious chance that Russia will use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. People at the moment are laughing about AI and saying how speculative it is. I will bet good money that most people will not be laughing in 20 years’ time.’
He may well have a point. Unfortunately for MacAskill, right now, most people appear to be laughing at him.