Sarah Parker arrived at Georgetown University eager to find a community. Raised an evangelical Christian, Parker said the world felt a bit “soulless” after she left the church. So when she spotted a sign on campus promoting an ideology called Effective Altruism, focused on maximizing the good a person can do in the world, it seemed like exactly what she was missing.
But soon after Parker became involved in Georgetown’s EA club, she discovered something that she didn’t think necessarily jibed with the efficient-giving ideals of the movement: It seemed to be spending considerable sums to draw in college students. Undergraduates like the ones who recruited her could earn prorated wages of as much as $80,000 a year to lead EA student groups, according to marketing materials — a noteworthy sum, considering campus clubs are often run by volunteers.
“Things started going weird,” said Parker, 28, who enrolled in college after a stint in the U.S. military. She began to question the movement’s largesse, including an EA group’s 2022 purchase of Wytham Abbey, a 27,000-square-foot English manor home for £14.9 million ($19 million). Some students secured funding to attend events in Boston and London.
“You don’t need to spend this much money,” she recalled thinking.
Some of the money to furnish student organizers’ salaries — and other outlays, including weekend retreats and the Oxford manor house (now back on the market) — traces back to the coffers of one billionaire donor: Dustin Moskovitz.
Moskovitz, 40, co-founded Facebook (now Meta Platforms Inc.), which makes up the bulk of his $23.6 billion fortune. He and his wife, Cari Tuna, 38, are the main funders behind Open Philanthropy, a grant-making organization that embraces EA principles and allocated about $5.9 million to members of its university organizer fellowship between 2022 and 2024. Over that period, the number of university EA groups expanded from about 150 to about 250.
While Open Philanthropy gives more to other endeavors — it recommended a grant of more than $61 million last year for malaria prevention, for example — its spending on recruitment is an indication that a movement focused on doing the most good for the most people has decided that attracting new adherents is an important use of its time and resources, said people who’ve been involved with EA.
Moskovitz did not respond to an interview request.
The donations have helped build a far-reaching influence network, recruiting students to EA through a wellspring of fellowships, jobs, shared workspaces near prestigious schools, and campus think tanks. Moskovitz’s money has become more critical to the movement since another major benefactor, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
But some college students harbor concerns that all the spending on “community-building” among young recruits is wasteful. Open Philanthropy says its goal is to “help others as much as we can,” with a focus on global health and warding off future threats, like rogue artificial intelligence and new pandemics.
More than a half-dozen college students and recent graduates who’ve been involved in EA groups, the majority of whom spoke with Bloomberg News anonymously for fear of retaliation, described a culture of free-flowing funding with minimal accountability focused on selective universities. Others posted on public forums about their misgivings or opted to leave the movement. Some of these students described the EA groups’ values as upside-down — focused on attracting new members at the expense of addressing problems like climate change.
“There are these persistent questions: Is the movement itself the most efficient way to do good, even though it’s focused on the most efficient ways to do good?” said Michael Moody, a professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University in Indianapolis.
Mike Levine, a spokesman for Open Philanthropy, noted that student organizers with a full course load would be unlikely to earn the full advertised sums of $45,000 to $80,000 because they are usually working part time. The highest stipend a full-time student has received so far for a 12-month period is $29,700, he said. From 2022 to 2024, the median payment was $5,118 per semester for full-time students organizing clubs at a group of 17 selective schools deemed “focus university groups” by the Centre for Effective Altruism. (The figure does not include alumni organizers or students taking a gap year.)
Levine added that the organization could make changes to the payment system before the next academic year.
“We’re wary of making this work difficult for organizers with fewer financial resources,” he said. “Over the years, we’ve seen strong evidence that, through building these networks, EA university groups make a concrete difference in students’ careers.”
AN OUTLIER
The former president of Columbia University’s EA group, Dave Banerjee, described feeling conflicted about getting paid to run his college club in a blog post last year outlining why he decided to step away from the movement. Banerjee wrote that the money made him feel like an outlier among other club leaders.
“Being paid to run a college club is weird,” Banerjee wrote. “All other college students volunteer to run their clubs. If my campus newspaper found out I was being paid this much, I am sure an EA takedown article would be published shortly after.”
Banerjee declined to comment beyond the post.
At least one student paper did take stock of Open Philanthropy’s spending on campus. A Harvard University group used Open Philanthropy funds for a 2022 weekend trip to Essex Woods, a rural Massachusetts retreat that charges up to $5,250 per night for groups, according to an investigation last year by the Harvard Crimson titled “What is Going on with Effective Altruism?” The paper reported that organizers sent out a feedback form after the trip, asking, “How much did the spending of money at this retreat make you feel uncomfortable?”
Other students described grant money distracting from the higher calling that EA was meant to represent.
Jeremy Crocker grew up Orthodox Jewish and “pretty much left” religion behind as a teenager. Years later, when he came across the EA club at New York University as a sophomore, he joined and went on to become club president — an experience that he remains proud of, he said.
But after graduating, he distanced himself from members of the broader community who seemed more focused on networking, career prospects and personal benefits than forming a framework for morality and giving.
“There are a lot of people who come into EA very driven at this point by all the cash that’s rolling around,” Crocker said in an interview last year.
Separately, a former member of the Georgetown EA group said earning an easy $30-per-hour salary at the EA-affiliated charity Giving What We Can, which had been associated with Bankman-Fried, seemed great until the FTX meltdown. When the student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, received an email saying they should retain documents for legal reasons tied to the FTX bankruptcy, it suddenly seemed they’d wound up in a movement whose contours they didn’t really understand.
Jessica McCurdy, head of groups at the Centre for Effective Altruism, which runs conferences and programming, said the movement encourages students to think beyond the well-worn career grooves of the highly educated.
“Many students want to have a large positive impact and find the ideas of EA compelling,” said McCurdy, who was an organizer at Yale University. She added that she was “super grateful for my EA group existing, as it helped provide me with resources and motivation to think outside of the default paths.”
FACEBOOK FOUNDER
Moskovitz’s own college experience began in a Harvard dorm he shared with Mark Zuckerberg, where they created Facebook together with Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollum. He stayed at the social media giant until 2008, when he departed to co-found the task-management software company Asana Inc.
Today, more than $15 billion, or about two-thirds of Moskovitz’s wealth, comes from his stake in Meta, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He and Tuna founded Good Ventures, a precursor to Open Philanthropy, in 2011. They also signed the Giving Pledge, a promise by some members of the ultrarich to give away most of their wealth.
Read More: Sam Bankman-Fried cut from Giving Pledge website after arrest
Moskovitz is relatively reclusive. Before a podcast interview last year, his team sent over a “user’s guide for Dustin” document, listing things he dislikes, including being videotaped, host Tim Ferriss said during the recording.
“I’m an introvert in a CEO role, and I care a lot about managing my energy,” Moskovitz told Ferriss.
Moskovitz explained how he was drawn to EA’s “cause agnosticism” — a clinical approach to charity that ignores feelings and personal preference.
“That leads you to different places that sometimes look very strange,” Moskovitz said. “The thing that does the most good is often something that’s important that other people aren’t doing for whatever reason.”
COMMUNITY BUILDING
Social networking, so central to Moskovitz’s personal fortune, proved key to the growth of the EA community, too. Its followers convene on a tangle of online forums and job boards, including the Reddit-style EA Forum. Another site, 80,000 Hours, is geared toward students and recent graduates looking to find careers tackling global problems. Open Philanthropy has recommended grants of more than $25 million to 80,000 Hours since 2017.)
The forum offers lists of the highest-impact jobs, ranking EA community-building as one of the top 11 worthiest careers that young people can pursue.
“We realise this may seem self-promotional,” the site says. “However, if we didn’t recommend what we ourselves do, then we’d be contradicting ourselves. We also wouldn’t want everyone to work on this area, since then we’d only build a community and never do anything.”
Fellowships and opportunities to earn income also abound. One email to members of Georgetown’s EA club in March 2022 highlighted a variety of grants available for spreading the word. Members were encouraged to sign up for trips to attend conferences in London and Boston, where accommodations and flights would be covered; to apply for cash prizes of up to $3,000 in a pool totaling $20,000; and to apply for awards from another $100,000 prize pool for writing a widely read EA blog.
The push to recruit and keep college-age members comes as the broader EA movement regroups from a turbulent stretch. In its most recent annual report, Open Philanthropy called the years since 2022 “a roller coaster,” spanning the collapse of FTX and volatility in Meta’s share price.
The dips and swells in Moskovitz’s fortune can affect the funding available for EA causes. In at least one period of constrained funding, Open Philanthropy attributed its cash crunch directly to Meta’s share price decline in 2022, a year in which the stock slumped 64%.
Moskovitz “continued to gradually diversify out of Meta over this period, so he and we are less (but still somewhat) exposed to those specific price swings going forward,” the report said.
EA suffered a few more blows recently. Its University of Oxford-based research center, the Future of Humanity Institute, announced it was shuttering this year. And the 500-year-old Oxford manor house — cheekily known as the Effective Altruism Castle — has been listed for what would amount to an inflation-adjusted loss.
Against that backdrop, Open Philanthropy still has its far-flung network of campus organizers, including at Norway’s University of Tromso — the self-proclaimed northernmost university in the world — the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and dozens more schools from Hanoi to the Hague.
Moody, the philanthropy professor, said it raises a thorny philosophical question: What is an appropriate amount to offer as a salary to work on altruistic causes?
“We don’t have a gauge to determine what’s too much or not enough to pay,” he said. Still, “the way that Dustin Moskovitz has gone about giving is pretty unusual, even compared to other billionaires.”