Guess what – Elon Musk actually donated to GiveDirectly at least once. To be precise, he supported 63 people. Haha – why not more people? I guess something didn’t feel right to him?
https://twitter.com/GiveDirectly/status/1407432167123263495?s=20&t=h_UYYIl0Qos3h5PAUaH-Gw
A month after the World Food Programme asked Elon for money, he actually donated $5.7 billion. To his own Musk foundation.
Well, that’s an efficient website
He brought Igor Kurganov on board, a former pro poker player, to help manage his foundation. These poker players are typically maths/chess/logical aces. And logical people tend to like the ideas of the effective altruism community:
“We think making a difference is best understood as the number of lives you improve, and how much you improve them.”
However, “the number of lives” is a tricky thing. Earth could remain habitable for 800 million years, so there could be about 21 million future generations. Therefore, the most rational thing may be to ensure future generations are well off. This approach is called longtermism.
The organisation “80,000 hours”, which is part of the effective altruism community, promotes prioritising working on anything that could be an (almost) existential threat to humanity: