Regarding the collapse of FTX

The collapse of FTX is likely to cause a tremendous amount of harm – to customers, employees, and many others who have relied on FTX. We are deeply concerned about those affected and, along with our community, are grappling with how to respond.

Though we do not know for sure whether anything illegal happened, we unequivocally condemn any immoral or illegal actions that may have taken place.

Prior to this, we had celebrated Sam Bankman-Fried’s apparent success, had held him up as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, and had written about how we encouraged him to use a strategy of earning to give (for example here). We feel shaken by recent events, and are not sure exactly what to say or think.

In the meantime, we will start by removing instances on our site where Sam was highlighted as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, since, to say the least, we no longer endorse that. We are leaving up discussions of Sam in places that seem important for transparency, for example this blog post on the growth of effective altruism in 2021.

In the coming weeks and months we will be thinking hard about what we should do going forward and ways in which we should have acted differently.

If you are out there trying the best you can to use your career to help solve the world’s most pressing problems with honesty and integrity, we also want to say we support and value you.

We are following the situation closely and hope to write more soon.

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Added 24 November 2022: Our podcast host, Rob Wiblin, has also shared some personal comments on the FTX bankruptcy on The 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Added 30 November 2022: We have also removed links to the FTX Future Fund, Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, which we had previous recommended as a place to work or apply for funding.

Added 16 December 2022: Sam Bankman-Fried has now been charged.