Financial shenanigans are nothing new, but the celebrated Sam Bankman-Fried and his company, FTX, stand out from other major tricksters of the past generation such as Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling at Enron, Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom, and even the king of them all, Bernie Madoff. Bankman-Fried and FTX are distinctive by virtue of their close ties to the ethical movement known as effective altruism. Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Madoff, and others offered no rationale for their hijinks beyond the lust for wealth, but Bankman-Fried made much, and ensured that much was made in the press, of his affiliation with effective altruism and its aim to “find ways of doing good that actually work.”
