EA - How many EA Billionaires five years from now? by Erich Grunewald

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How many EA Billionaires five years from now?, published by Erich Grunewald on August 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Dwarkesh Patel argues that "there will be many more effective altruist billionaires". He gives three reasons for thinking so: People who seek glory will be drawn to ambitious and prestigious effective altruist projects. One such project is making a ton of money in order to donate it to effective causes. Effective altruist wealth creation is a kind of default choice for "young, risk-neutral, ambitious, pro-social tech nerds", i.e. people who are likelier than usual to become very wealthy. Effective altruists are more risk-tolerant by default, since you don't get diminishing returns on larger donations the same way you do on increased personal consumption. These early-stage businesses will be able to recruit talented effective altruists, who will be unusually aligned with the business's objectives. That's because if the business is successful, even if you as an employee don't cash out personally, you're still having an impact (either because the business's profits are channelled to good causes, as with FTX, or because the business's mission is itself good, as with Wave). The post itself is kind of fuzzy on what "many" means or which time period it's concerned with, but in a follow-up comment Patel mentions having made an even-odds bet to the effect that there'll be ≥10 new effective altruist billionaires in the next five years. He also created a Manifold Markets question which puts the probability at 38% as I write this. (A similar question on whether there'll be ≥1 new, non-crypto, non-inheritance effective altruist billionaire in 2031 is currently at 79% which seems noticeably more pessimistic.) I commend Patel for putting his money where his mouth is! Summary With (I believe) moderate assumptions and a simple model, I predict 3.5 new effective altruist billionaires in 2027. With more optimistic assumptions, I predict 6.0 new billionaires. ≥10 new effective altruist billionaires in the next five years seems improbable. I present these results and the assumptions that produced them and then speculate haphazardly. Assumptions If we want to predict how many effective altruist billionaires there will be in 2027, we should attend to base rates. As far as I know, there are five or six effective altruists billionaires right now, depending on how you count. They are Jaan Tallinn (Skype), Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook), Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), Gary Wang (FTX) and one unknown person doing earning to give. We could also count Cari Tuna (Dustin Moskovitz's wife and cofounder of Open Philanthropy). It's possible that someone else from FTX is also an effective altruist and a billionaire. Of these, as far as I know only Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang were effective altruists prior to becoming billionaires (the others never had the chance, since effective altruism wasn't a thing when they made their fortunes). William MacAskill writes: Effective altruism has done very well at raising potential funding for our top causes. This was true two years ago: GiveWell was moving hundreds of millions of dollars per year; Open Philanthropy had potential assets of $14 billion from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. But the last two years have changed the situation considerably, even compared to that. The primary update comes from the success of FTX: Sam Bankman-Fried has an estimated net worth of $24 billion (though bear in mind the difficulty of valuing crypto assets, and their volatility), and intends to give essentially all of it away. The other EA-aligned FTX early employees add considerably to that total. There are other prospective major donors, too. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, is an active EA donor. At least one person earning to give (and not related to FT...