Austin: I’m happy to announce that Caroline Ellison has accepted a role at Manifund, to develop our funding platform and research how to effectively direct philanthropic dollars.
In fact, she started a work trial on July 13, which converted to a fulltime role on Aug 10. Over the past two months, she’s been publishing her work and supporting Manifund users under the pseudonym “Carol”.
How did I come to consider this at all?
- I specifically enjoyed Caroline’s tumblr and other writings, which I found thoughtful and relatable. I invited her to Manifest 2026, just because I wanted to meet her. During the festival, she came to my night market booth, and asked about joining our team, which I was interested to explore.
- I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold. They funded the retreat which drew me into the EA community, and the conference where I met my wife. Much of Manifund’s work today is directly inspired by the Future Fund’s approach.
- On FTX itself, I remain conflicted. It was their money and spirit that enabled the Future Fund, and I still admire many aspects of FTX and the individuals who worked there. But also: FTX did wrong. Its collapse harmed users (myself included), and damaged the movement which I deeply care about. I may write more about this in the future, but in any case:
- I believe in redemption. Caroline has admitted her faults, worked to make creditors whole, and served her time in prison. I’d like to give her the opportunity to contribute back to the world; I hope that the world will concur.
Why did I hire Caroline for Manifund?
- Manifund needs talent. Leading AI labs warn about recursive self improvement; poverty and disease remain unsolved; billions of animals suffer hell on earth. I, my team, and many EAs I know, are often burning the midnight candle to address these wrongs. I don’t wish to sideline a pair of capable hands. (We’re hiring!)
- Caroline brings specific, useful expertise around finance and systems management to Manifund. I know this might seem like a joke — why would you trust someone who blew up an exchange? — but in fact she’s already been invaluable, for example building a reconciliation tool which identified several misregistered transactions in our database, in the 5-6 figures. (Obviously, she and I will be extremely motivated not to repeat FTX’s mistakes).
- Through working together, I’ve had the privilege to know Caroline as more than just an icon of FTX. I find her to be kind, humble, down to earth, hardworking, smart and witty. She cares deeply about doing right, for our users, our donors, and the world. She shares many of my sensibilities around extant problems of philanthropy; see, for example, our essay in support of for-profits. She adores Ada, my 2yo daughter (and, the feeling is clearly mutual).
Manifund strives to be unusually transparent. And so, I apologize for our minor deception, in using a pseudonym over the last couple months. I still endorse having done this — I think it’s relatively common to work with people pseudonymously, when their real identity is famous. But I want to call out that we compromised on transparency here, which I do not take lightly.
I understand that some of our users, donors, and partners may now be skittish about working with Manifund, given this announcement. I appreciate any trust you are willing to extend, and ask that you judge us by our historical and future outputs. You (or your LLM) can take a look at Manifund’s source code, underlying data, finances and research; if you wish, you can see Caroline’s specific code commits and comments on Manifund.
I’m happy to take questions, over public comments or emailed to [email protected]. (I can’t promise I’ll be able to reply to every one.) In the meantime, I’d like to ask Caroline to say a few words.
Caroline: I’ve said a lot about what I did wrong at Alameda/FTX—you can read what I said at my plea, during trial, and remarks at sentencing. I’m deeply sorry for what I did, and I completely understand why people may not want to work with me. But I’m very grateful to Austin for giving me a second chance, and judging me on my current work performance rather than my past. I feel very lucky not only to have a job, but to be working somewhere that I think is doing great work and has a mission I believe in.
When I started my work trial, unsure if I’d get a full-time offer at the end, I didn’t want to go through a public announcement just to potentially be let go a month later. But now that I’ve accepted a full-time offer at Manifund, I want to be upfront about it.
I’m excited to continue improving our technical infrastructure, working on operations and customer support, and posting updates on our newsletter.
I probably won’t reply to comments on this post—sorry.
For me, this comes down to trust.
FTX collapsed because of fraud. Customers lost money they had trusted the exchange to hold, and the people responsible, including Caroline, were rightly held accountable.
I also believe in second chances and the possibility of redemption. I briefly managed cG's criminal justice reform program, and I deeply believe it's a moral good to give people a path back to participating in society after they've done wrong.
But I also believe that trust – especially trust from a community someone harmed – has to be earned, not simply extended. Going from prison for financial crimes and causing harm with philanthropy to a role with real influence over finances and philanthropy on an extremely short timeline is a leap I do not believe has been earned.
Organizations that ask donors to trust them with money should hold themselves to a higher standard. A recent financial fraud conviction would disqualify someone from a finance role at CEA, regardless of any reputational considerations. I am disappointed with the decision itself, not just its effect on our work.
I saw some of the harm Caroline and her colleagues caused up close. When I took over as CEO of Effective Ventur... (read more)
Ambitious Impact will also not be participating in or collaborating with Manifund projects for the foreseeable future.
Thanks Zach for writing on behalf of CEA.
EA Australia is also not going to be platforming Manifund for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for speaking out. I agree with this statement.
I think Manifund’s decision to hire Caroline Ellison reflects a gross failure of judgment. As a result, Successif, the organization I lead, won’t collaborate with Manifund until our trust in its leadership is restored.
Good Impressions will also not be participating in or collaborating with Manifund projects for the foreseeable future
Thank you for writing this, Zach.
High Impact Professionals also won’t collaborate with Manifund for the foreseeable future.
All my sympathy for the FTX harm you had to live and suffer up close. I don't doubt how harrowing, stressful and painful it must have been for all who suffered it, for all the careers that were affected and for the overall damage that was done to the EA brand and its capacity to 'do good better'. All my sympathy as well for the challenges of avoiding bad publicity being piled upon EA, all the more so at a time when the US administration seems rather keen on maligning the movement. I would say, though, that you do seem to be presenting a bit of a catch-22 scenario here. How is Caroline supposed to 'earn that trust back'? As far as I've known (which is to say, what is accessible through the public record) she has been engaging since the time of th... (read more)
While I am thankful for the transparency and understand that you don't want to take part in discussing this in public forum threads, I, and maybe others, want to.
I have to say, I think this is harming what remains of the Effective Altruism name/brand and is making me reconsider openly associating with it.
If we ever hope to rebuild the trust that was lost and construct a better public image of EA, we need to have strong community norms that people who commit wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering have no place in any type of financial role in organisations that make up this community.
I get that you have personal ties, and I can understand wanting to act from a position of forgiveness towards a friend and uphold norms of redemption. From an outside perspective, though, these same personal ties can be perceived as more of the same mixing of professional and personal lives that infamously happened at FTX.
I, too, believe people can redeem themselves and, after completing their sentence, should be able to rejoin society. And I also think that the EA community can only ever gain a positive public image if they beat the accusations of fraud and favouritism through an abundance of care about these things and strict professional norms. Background checks for financial roles that exclude people with felony convictions for financial crimes are, in my opinion, justified.
After researching this a little more, I'm quite taken aback that apparently you still didn't return the 500.000$ FTX investment, and instead let it go to litigation. So the Trust that is making the victims whole is currently suing you (Manifold for Charity) for that Money, while you hire one of the perpetrators.
Surely, even though you may not consider these facts related, you must understand how this looks from the outside. Let me spell it out: It looks like Caroline is continuing to benefit from the fraud by being paid by an organisation that kept the money she helped steal.
I think I can share that the $500k was a grant (not investment) from the Future Fund, to fund a program where successful Manifold traders could choose which charities would receive donations: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mbBfFHKEDBTwTSSJX/predicting-for-good-charity-prediction-markets
Manifund ran this program for ~2 years and distributed most of this funding to charities & charitable projects, with the top 3 being Givewell (~$61k), LTFF (~$38k), Rethink Priorities (~$27k). We offered to return remaining funds to the estate; we are still in litigation. This case has been going on for years, and may continue for months at least; litigation takes a while. I do hope to write a retro on this overall program someday.
For reference, Lightcone received ~$4.2m from FTX Future Fund and eventually returned ~$1.7m (and then paid some more in legal fees, maybe ~$0.6m): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQcbc7r4R8mvqc/the-lightcone-is-nothing-without-its-people
(Unfortunately, it's tricky for me to comment on active legal proceedings, but I intend to check to see what our lawyer thinks is reasonable for me to say here. Please follow up if I haven't said anything in 2 weeks.)
I care for non-optics reasons, and would appreciate a follow up when you find the time.
I think I concur. It seems like a bad call to put someone who committed massive financial crimes into a grantmaking platform development/research role, especially one in the EA/AI safety community. I don't disagree that redemption is possible and that people can change, but I think the conditions for hiring someone in these kinds of cases (e.g. time since the crime occurred and weight of evidence that the person has changed) need to be a function of the sensitivity of the role and the magnitude of the crime. And I don't think that bar is anywhere close to having been met here.
If every decision made by any organization under the EA umbrella can make you reconsider associating with the brand, are there any other brands you associate with that manage to maintain the standards you look for?
Every discussion I've seen makes me think that people within EA overwhelmingly think this is a bad idea, and many of them plan to interact differently with Manifund going forward; for a community without formal standards for who "belongs", that seems like as much as you could reasonably ask for (aside from even more overwhelming condemnation, I suppose).
Caveat: Our differing instincts might be informed by a different understanding of where Manifund sits within EA (I think of them as a fairly minor organization, but EA is a loose and chaotic group of orgs, and I only see certain parts of the elephant).
I'm happy that people overwhelmingly think that this is a bad idea. When I posted the comment, this wasn't clear to me. I posted this because all I had seen at that point was a stream of positive comments on substack which all celebrated that Caroline was given a second chance in this way. I wanted there to at least be one comment expressing why this is bad.
I may have overestimated Manifunds importance since it was regularly recommended to me as where I should apply to fund a side project of mine, and I seriously considered it.
So no, I don't reconsider my involvement after every bad action by any org, only when something seems to me like one of the worst moves, while seeing people I respect celebrating it, with little to no pushback (which now is clearly happening).
I wish this weren't the case, for what it's worth. I have some aspiration of Manifund being a neutral utility or infrastructure, similar to Twitter or Substack or Stripe, where it's understood that people and orgs of very different backgrounds will still use it for funding.
There's some evidence of this. I believe Manifund is the only platform that has hosted projects receiving donations from people as disparate as Marc Andreessen and Beth Barnes.
>FWIW I did send the CEA community health team a draft of this announcement.
Since you mention my team and you emailed me an FYI about 16 hours before this announcement went up, here's my opinion: don't hire someone with a fraud conviction for a finance or philanthropy role.
I think the heads up was optional; thanks for doing it at all. But it felt weird that you included it in your comment, because a heads up to me doesn't really make a difference on the overall situation.
It took the Catholics 2000 years to get to the point where they could systematically protect and enable paedophiles and still survive the blowback. It should be quite obvious why EA's reputation is far more brittle, especially when it comes to funding organisations.
I think you have every right to hire any cofounder you like if you run a startup, whatever their history, but then it shouldn't be a 501c associated in such a big way with Effective Altruism.
From the perspective of someone who spent years in tedious discussions about being extremely careful with public outreach to not damage the perception of EA as a brand when we were building EA Germany, this feels like a slap in the face.
Look, Austin made the comparison
I may have been more short tempered and aggressive than necessary, and arguing the specifics of what harm the Catholic Church has done is indeed beside the point. What I was gesturing at was: Wishing that EA were the same as a 2000 year old world-spanning religion in terms of public perception when scandals happen has some obvious problems.
I don't think "The EA name and brand" is that tricky to reason about really. Also what we "wish" the public could do is unfortunately not reality. I think there are a number of reasonable takes and good arguments for and against focusing on brand, which have been discussed much on the forum. These 2 might be the most obvious
1) "Don't worry about PR it hurts epistemics and decision making. We should openly discuss any topic even if the public find it revolting or outside the overton window. This will help us truly do what has the highest EV, and achieve the most good - public perception be darned"
2) " EA being in good standing towards most people helps EA's do more good. PR is important for attracting people to the movement and makes community building easier. It helps It also helps donors outside EA feel more warm towards EA ideas and spend their money more cost-effectively. If we are not pariahs, or even better seen as good by most people, that will help us redirect more thought, talent and resouces towards the movement.
And everything in between, and probably some orthoganal takes too. There are arguments for and against these. But I don't think its tricky to reason about as you ... (read more)
"'The EA name & brand' is kind of a tricky thing to reason about."
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that we should be willing to pay a lot to preserve EA's image, and it seems likely that hiring Ellison will cause significant negative backlash. It could be valuable to look at the EA community's historical willingness to pay to improve its image, so here are some proxies:
- CEA reported that about 4% of its 2025 spending ($21.8M) was on marketing and communications, which comes out to roughly $870k. I'm not sure how much of this work is directly about improving EA's name and brand, but I suspect that's maybe half the theory of change for all of CEA's media outreach?
- For reference, Fable says this money was spent on improving social media accounts, redesigning effectivealtruism.org, running an "EA Stories" video campaign, and working with journalists to improve how accurately EA is described in the media.
- Spending on the team is projected to be well above $1M this year, and most of the work (or at least the work related to The Altruists) is reactive media handling and corrections.
- I'm not confident in this, but I suspect that the primary theory of change for giving grants to An
... (read more)I don’t think you should make decisions like this based on “what’s good for EA reputation.” I am not swayed by those arguments here.
I do think — unless you think Caroline was wrongfully convicted or convicted under a bogus law and you can say that — this seems a shockingly naïve decision.
We’ve seen hubris and in-group biased naïveté before, the kind that treats EAs and EA orgs as if we’re somehow above boring, straight-up sensible, standard safeguards within a business because we’re too smart and too morally evolved for all that or something, or too rational. This attitude caused some of the FTX failures. Now you’re here telling us that you’re ignoring boring, straight-up sensible standard safeguards within a business like “don’t hire someone with a finance-related felony conviction into a finance position.” And only 4 years after the crime was committed. What reasons do you have to ignore that standard?
I can be sympathetic and even forgiving in my heart of Caroline as a person. I don’t need to turn that feeling into a finance job for her. I’d be less concerned if an org were hiring her in a comms role based on her writings or something and could assure everyone that she’d have nothing to do with finances. Still controversial, but not so out of touch.
This is not smart or wise. It’s the kind of willful, wide-eyed foolishness, while fooling oneself into thinking it’s good, that we’ve seen before. It does not bode well.
For context, Caroline Ellison has been recently convicted for financial fraud amounting to billions of dollars. Manifund has just hired her for a finance role. They couldn't find a single qualified person that hadn't committed billions of dollars worth of financial fraud?
Nobody has to be diplomatic or mince words here, or couch this in terms of "reputation": this decision is rank incompetence, plainly obvious to anyone with a whit of common sense. Nobody should trust Manifund after this.
To add further context: The Manifund team currently consists of just two employees: CEO Austin Chen and "Carol N", the pseudonym for Caroline Ellison. Literally 50% of the employees in the organization are convicted financial fraudsters.
Now when people have their funds approved, they will know that decision was made by a convicted fraudster. The article recruiting new hires was written by a convicted fraudster (who was hiding it at the time). Irrespective of her actual role, the fact that she makes up a large percentage of the employee base gives her a significant power in the organization: it's crazy that she is apparently the first hire here.
This is a terrible decision on every dimension you can look at it. It's certainly a brave decision: that does not make it a sane or moral one.
It's hard to believe this is real. When you read it, it sounds like a joke. This is a shockingly terrible decision, truly beyond the pale.
On Substack and also a bit on here, people don't seem to draw a sufficiently complex, nuanced distinction between the ideas of forgiveness and accountability.
Can we show compassion, mercy, and even forgiveness to people have done wrong? Yes, absolutely!
When someone has badly abused a position of power, should they be given a similar position of power again soon after? No, absolutely not!
(And that's not even addressing the conflict of interest or potential corruption in this case.)
We can think of a hundred analogous hypotheticals to illustrate this point. Let's say a bartender was convicted of poisoning his patrons' drinks. This is a terrible crime. Can we still show him compassion and mercy? Could we even forgive him? I'd like to believe so, even in the case of such a heinous crime.
But let's say he gets out of prison in a few years. Would it be the right decision for a restaurant to hire him as a line cook? Would that be safe, ethical, and responsible? Hell no!
There are dozens of other jobs he could have that don't involve the risk of poisoning —... (read more)
This is not really directly relevant, but I feel somewhat confused by considering statements made during a trial as strong evidence of someone taking seriously the harm they caused (to be clear, you didn't express this directly, but I've seen other supporters of this decision say this, and Caroline's message suggests I should take her statements in the legal proceedings as evidence). Caroline was directly incentivized to both cooperate to make creditors whole, and to express regret and wrongdoing, because she would spend more time in prison if she did not do these things. I think it would be far more meaningful evidence if she had, for example, come forward and admitted to wrongdoing and helped right things when she did not have an incentive to do so (e.g. whistleblown before things blew up).
I don't really think individual organizations have an obligation to protect the brand of EA as a whole, and ideally they just improve the brand of EA by doing good things themselves. But I'm a utilitarian, and I aggregate. I hope that you're right that she's an incredible hire, and the marginal value Manifund produces by doing this offsets the obviously very large costs the ecosystem will bear due to your decision.
As most commenters write, hiring Caroline for a finance role does not strike me as the best decision. One thing I find missing in this conversation is putting ourselves in Austin or Caroline's shoes.
Most comments are expressing amazement that Austin would hire Caroline when it's so bad for Manifund's reputation. If anything, this strengthens my view that Austin is doing something costly--much more expensive than the $500k FTX investment Manifund is trying to keep--because he believes it's the right thing to do. We should be encouraging people to do what they believe is right even if it's unpopular. Dragging Austin through the mud for doing what he believes is right does not seem like the ideal way to express disagreement. (On the FTX clawback, that legal dispute is several years old and doesn't strike me as relevant to the recent hiring decision.)
For Caroline, imagine you're an EA who made a catastrophic moral error. You'd feel horrible about it, you'd spend years reflecting on it, and then you'd hope you can do something useful and constructive with the rest of your life. Presumably you'd want a job where you can leverage your existing skillset to do something good.
Some other comm... (read more)
“the main lesson we should draw is that most people do terrible things when their surroundings excuse it, and show far less regret than Caroline has.”
Hiring Caroline for a finance position within 6 months of her getting out of jail for billions of dollars of fraud is exactly her surroundings excusing it.
No, it's because Caroline plays with his 2-year-old daughter. He explicitly said this
More generally, jumping from "this is costly" to "it's a signal of moral goodness and conviction" is a silly line of reasoning that's common in EA circles.
Thank you for writing this comment.
Optics aside, I do not personally find the decision objectionable. When someone has been found guilty of violating a norm, it is not immediately obvious whether they should be considered more or less likely to violate it again. On the one hand, the specific violation is evidence of a general disposition toward that kind of transgression. On the other hand, being caught and held accountable can leave an indelible mark, and prompt serious self-reflection and self-improvement. On priors, I’m not sure which effect dominates. But in Caroline’s case, it seems reasonably clear to me—given my knowledge of her background, court transcripts, and existing incentives—that she is very, very unlikely to engage in anything remotely resembling financial fraud ever again.
I agree with your approach to reasoning about the chance of recidivism, and had been mulling it over much the same way when I wrote my above comment. My uninformed prior for the average ex-con recently released from prison would be cautious, just because my understanding of the literature on recidivism rates tells me that for the average person, the tendency to violate further seems to be stronger than the mark of having been held accountable.
Of course, every individual is different. If you know Caroline well enough, have done deeper research into her case, and feel you're able to be objective about the matter, it might be completely reasonable for you to be fine with hiring her for a finance role. Given that I don't know Caroline personally, nor have I dived deep into the particulars of her situation or her public statements, I currently lean towards greater caution. (In my personal experience, I've been burned by people enough times that I'm sadly in general less trusting than I was, which might play a part in this too.)
Over the next few years, if Caroline continues on a better path, I am hopeful that she will earn our trust once again.
I also worry about the converse: because various AI safety people are genuinely well-intentioned, some people assume that their work must be good for the world.
Sadly, good people do indeed sometimes do bad things, and we are well to remember that fact.
Reasonable, thank you for flagging! @richard_ngo has been writing a series on this, how AI safety-motivated people, inside and outside of labs, may have contributed significantly to speedup. And he argues that even orgs that many people admire, like METR, are not immune to this -- I think he has a quote like "the METR graph has significantly contributed to race dynamics"
I don't have a settled thought on whether I agree overall, but I certainly appreciate his speaking up. I believe his stance is also that we should give up on "EA", which, I currently disagree with. (But, perhaps "EA" will give up on me...)
You’re asking us to believe that Caroline can not only out-contribute the next best available candidate, but out-contribute that PLUS the negative externalities she brings to the project and everything associated with it. I urge you to set aside your personal feelings and consider how many projects this affects.
Personal notes: I've had friendly interactions with Austin and spent some time in the Mox coworking space. I've never met Caroline, though I liked her Tumblr and hope she finds ways to do good moving forward. The FTX collapse cost me thousands of dollars, destroyed one of my favorite video games, made my job much harder for the next year, and damaged a community I love.
Thoughts on the situation, as someone who cares a lot about EA's reputation and also thinks it's sometimes good to make unusual decisions based on controversial ethical principles:
Perspective-taking: Ariel's comment is really good. Read that first if you haven't.
Competence: Having read Going Infinite and a bunch of news stories, I don't feel qualified to distinguish between "Caroline is bad at operations/finance/judging ideas" and "Caroline is good at those things — after all, FTX/Alameda had lots of early success — but she got overwhelmed by the complexities of an org with billions of dollars in assets while struggling with interpersonal entanglements". If Austin thinks her abilities are a good fit, I'm not all that inclined to doubt him.
Personal ethics: My ethical qualms are with Austin, not Caroline. I don't think... (read more)
I agree with most of your points except "this is small potatoes". Caroline is the protagonist of The Altruists coming out in November, which will likely get lots of eyes on what she's doing now. If the series completely flops, I'd agree.
Thank you for weighing in, Aaron. I'll note that Manifund is unusually, primarily "bootstrapped"; which is to say, we have received comparatively few direct donations for our operating expenses -- perhaps $100-300k in total over 3 years, primarily from SFF rounds? Instead, we earn our operating expenses on a 5% fiscal sponsorship + operating fee, taken on large donations made through the platform, probably north of $500k in total. We've also earned some money via treasury operations and other arrangements, including, at one point, a loan to Lightcone.
Of course, it's possible that some of our past donors will be unhappy with their 5% fee being used in this way; but I would argue that this is a bit more like paying a 2.9% fee to Stripe and then Stripe hiring someone you don't like.
I think it's good to give people second chances and I think Caroline deserves a second chance from society. I think it's extremely bad for that second chance to come from an organization that received money that she and others misappropriated from customers.
It is concerning to me that this wasn't obviously disqualifying for this particular position.
I note that in this post Austin doesn't actually directly acknowledge that FTX misused customer funds, instead just saying that he's "conflicted," and that FTX "did wrong" and its "collapse harmed users". I'm particularly confused what there is to be "conflicted" about. For avoidance of doubt: Austin, do you think that SBF and Caroline acted unethically and illegally in misusing customer funds, and do you think it is right that both were given criminal sentences? I think it would be good to clarify this.
Note: "You" = Austin in this comment
The sense I get from reading this is that Ellison's history with FTX was a significant positive reason in your mind for hiring her, whereas people might have generally expected this to be a negative factor. This reminded me of your talk with Elizabeth Van Nostrand on the topic of FTX. There, you expressed similar conflicted feeling around the events of FTX. One of the things you expressed was feelings of concern around the community reaction in regard to a sense of loyalty, that the reaction created an impression that people might not stand by someone if things went badly. I feel like there is some tension with the idea that people from the EA community are engaging in backstabbing in terms of their reaction to the FTX fiasco, while presumably you don't view testifying against SBF as similarly implicating the concern about loyalty.
To me, this reminds me of a attitude that I associate with Silicon Vally VC culture and see coming through strongly in the sentiments around this issue. It seems to me like the feeling/pirnciple you are invoke here is more like downside protection than loyalty. I think there is a feeling prevalent in SV that entrenched ... (read more)
To single out one specific point … The sentiment around feeling indebted to FTX and by proxy people associated with it seems like a deeply worrying and flawed viewpoint?
If the argument was purely “she’s smart and can likely do good work, let’s give her a chance”, I’d be far less concerned.
I'm co-director of Effective Altruism Netherlands, writing in a personal capacity. I think this decision is clearly wrong.
Hiring someone with a recent fraud conviction into a finance role at a grantmaking organisation is what ordinary safeguards exist to prevent. Justifying the bypassing of ordinary safeguards because the people involved are smart and well-intentioned is a fair summary of how FTX happened.
This is obviously going to be a very controversial post and action. I'll start by disclosing that I have always been very sympathetic to Caroline, and even with all that's happened, I think any exploration in depth of the whole FTX-Alameda fiasco will still show her to be 1) extremely talented, 2) hard-working (these two should be uncontroversial) and 3) morally serious and conscientious (even though she participated in fraud and made catastrophic mistakes in her life). For argumentative purposes, I think premise 3 is not needed, but I think it is true.
If one wanted to speculate about the possible consequences of Caroline's hire by Manifund, I think it makes sense to consider two levels: the one that affects Manifund and the one that affects EA as a whole.
For the first, I think one can make a case that hiring Caroline is positive expected value for the company. Given premises 1 and 2 and the fact that her actions under SBF have effectively made her unemployable and (I presume) a pariah for most of the EA community, Austin may be getting access to an unusually valuable employee whom much of the labor market is unwilling to hire because of reputational risk. I know lots of you woul... (read more)
Some quick thoughts on this, cross-posted from a chat group, largely because I'm very confused by people's and organizations strong reactions to this announcement, and usually when I disagree with everyone in the EA community I find out I'm missing some important context.
- If the concerns were about risks of misappropriation of donor funds, or anything object level, I would expect people to be more curios about what Ellison's role actually is, and what capital controls are in place, but nobody is asking about that, so my impression is that this is almost entirely about Ellison being unpopular and reputational concerns. If that is not the case I really don't understand why nobody is asking something like "What controls are in place to prevent Ellison, Austin, or anyone else, from stealing donations?". An organization like manifund should have systems in place to prevent anyone they hire (ex-convict or not) from stealing donor funds.
- On reputational concerns, it's not clear to me that someone like Ellison (2 years at Jane Street, 3 times top 10% at the Putnam, very rich parents, ...) working on "improving technical infrastructure, operations and customer support, and posting newsletter
... (read more)On object-level concerns: Several comments have indeed stated such concerns. I also think that orgs with poor judgement in one area often exhibit poor judgement in other areas, particularly in smaller orgs. It seems reasonable to be concerned that someone who thought it was a good idea to hire someone recently released from prison for financial crimes for a financial/philanthropy role might also not have the foresight to establish safeguards/controls.
On the value of reputation: I argued why I believe reputation matters in a previous comment. Many AI safety orgs’ path to impact entails convincing policymakers to enact certain legislative changes. This theory of change assumes that the org can actually secure meetings with key staff. The org’s core work (research, expertise, policy recs) matters, but they also need to build credibility and trust.
On how reputation is formed: I would love to live in a world where people looked through and carefully weighed the evidence before drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, that's not how most people outside of EA operate.
Here is one non-EA example: There is controversy over the extent to which the racist, far-right Israeli Minister Ben Gvir repres... (read more)
The first time I saw SBF in a newsletter from 80k and felt skeptical, I self-censored. Even as things unfolded, I talked very sycophantically and did not manage to speak out my doubts.
I don't want this to happen again, and I'm afraid it's happening again, with people playing mind games similar to the ones that convinced them that SBF was living frugally and definitely trustworthy.
In doubt, I'll leave this comment for the record, and will happilly look at it full of shame if need be:
1-I do not trust Caroline and reading the post and the discussion so far does not give me enough signal to trust her more. No hard feelings, but that's just how things are for me and part of my surroundings. If you think she is trustworthy, it means there is probably a way to make me update? It'd probably need to be a very hard-to-fake signal. Trust has to correlate to evidence.
2-Hoo boy, my friends at the EA table in university already had a hard time. It's gonna get even harder for them.
3-I'm afraid this will feed even more of the absolutely pointless EA vs LW war. Will not expand on that.
(2) For what it's worth, I don't think this particular news is likely to reach the people your friends are talking to at their university table.
You could spend years engaging with EA and never hear about Manifund, and if you did, you'd probably hear about the conference they run rather than the decision to hire the second-most-famous person involved in a financial scandal that happened when the class of 2030 were 14-year-olds.
If someone does hear about the decision, and worries that Manifest represents something bad at the heart of EA, you might show them the comment thread on this post — I think it's a good representation of the community as a whole (some people biting bullets, many people pointing out various ethical concerns).
And on (3), I don't see this feeding into any war much: it seems like ~90% of EA people and ~90% of LW people (maybe 95?) think this is a bad decision.
People won't specifically know about Manifund, but I put a high probability that half the reference class that knew about FTX (which happens to correlate, for me, with influential elites) will say something such as "Oh I heard you hired back SBF's criminal girlfriend or something", often from a line read half-attentively in a newspaper or seen online. I've had rumors of this shape around this aplenty in my time, the worse part being that some of those people did not want to talk to us or discuss any of this afterwards (which makes showing this post and subsequent reactions quite hard). The shadowban is the worst part. And this is setting aside pre-existing quarrels where people within the university tried to attack us.
To give you an idea, some of my surroundings were asked in private if SBF were their "boss". I had people enjoy our philosophical discussions, only to walk back and leave as soon as we told them we were from the EA club. It's hard to just live this on repeat mode.
On point 2, I think this extrapolates to the whole community and its adjacents, which is why I think this decision is bonkers and potentially extremely harmful for the EA/effective giving space.
I see an opinion on these forums that seems something like, 'We shouldn't care what people think of us.' I heartily disagree. Reputation does a huge amount of work in relationship building and trust. Reputational damage has real consequences (SBF etc etc).
This sort of decision makes speaking to people about the value of EA ideas much more difficult. We can't keep shooting ourselves in the foot like this.
After some reflection, I realized what may be the worst part of this decision.
Austin Chen has decided to reward and endorse Caroline Ellison's crimes at FTX by giving her a job in exchange for the stolen money that FTX gave to Manifund. Austin explicitly said that this decision is out of "debt" to Caroline for the ill-gotten money FTX gave to Manifund. Austin's explicitly stated reasoning is: commit crimes that benefit me and I'll reward you.
Previously, Austin harshly criticized the EA community for its supposed disloyalty to Sam Bankman-Fried in the wake of the revelations of FTX's fraud.
In November 2022, Austin wrote of people in EA who denounced or dissociated themselves from Sam Bankman-Fried:
In April 2025, Austin said:
... (read more)This is why people don't like EA. Astonishingly, monumentally bad judgement.
- An underlying assumption here seems to be not just that people deserve to make a living, but that forgiveness is inherently good. While this is a common axiom in the West, it is not obvious to me that this moral claim is correct.
- Two issues regarding communications:
- On a macro level: “Reputation” is not a vanity consideration. It is integral to the theory of change of many EA orgs, particularly those focused on AI policy. A random legislative staffer is unlikely to see the comments on this post, but they may see the upcoming Netflix series on FTX. A google search on “FTX and EA” now reveals this post: https://whatweare.substack.com/p/no-one-is-going-to-save-the-ea-brand. It's not impossible to imagine this hiring decision making it harder for AI policy orgs to secure meetings with staffers to advance important safety legislation.
- On a micro level: Most people in EA probably would have opposed this hire anyway, but this press release seems to have only engendered more concern and, frankly, confusion. Several people have sought clarity regarding the rationale for the hire as this statement implied a mixture of personal considerations. I was most perplexed by the section on transparency,
... (read more)Adds additional context to https://revive.blog/b/worldoptimization on Manifold's new Blog Revival Project, with Austin pledging towards reviving his then-anonymous coworker's blog.
(Just found this interesting and mildly funny, not saying the pledging or project is bad. Though I agree with others that handling finances at a two-person org is very clearly a bad role for someone convicted of financial fraud, and "I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund" should point the other way.)
I weakly think that Austin can hire who he likes.
I moderately think that EA could do with caring a less about reputation and more about good work. Does Caroline do good work? Seems like the org will internalise that, so it's probably up to donors and other orgs to decide.
I agree with both points here. A few general thoughts, echoing something I wrote in 2022.
- Very hard for an outsider to assess whether someone is likely to be good at a job. I generally don't like to second guess other people's hiring decisions.
- There are extreme cases where I'd second guess anyone. SBF is obviously a psychopath and hiring him would be insane. Likewise, there are cases when you don't hire the (narrowly conceived) ‘best’ person for the job. I would never hire Diddy to promote a party or produce a track, for instance.
- I don't think Caroline is such a case. I view her as a cautionary tale about getting sucked into the orbit of a charismatic psychopath when you're a young person. I'll never know what I would have done in her shoes. For what it's worth, I once applied to be SBF's friend in the Bahamas because it was advertised on the EA forum.
- If Caroline were hired at CG or CEA or a few other orgs, I'd be worried about reputational harms. Manifund is much more marginal than that. I think reputational harms will be commensurately marginal.
- One version of this point is to note that EA's critics are looking for anything to pounce on because we're a bunch of weirdos, and Austin
... (read more)Even though I understand part of the reasoning behind this decision, and I sincerely wish Caroline Ellison well, I feel very uncomfortable with it. I'm particularly uneasy about the personal reasons given as part of the justification.
I think this was overall a poor decision, and it makes me question what kind of governance and decision-making process Manifund has, and whether anyone besides Austin was meaningfully involved.
As I read this comment section, the story my mind generates is a people want to express 'this is bad and I want people to see that I think it's bad'. Is that how people who are writing the negative comments feel?
Or do you feel like you could be convinced this is fine/none of your business?
Cos personally I think I could be convinced this is a bad idea, or that Manifund should not be considered an org in good standing[1]. I don't think it would destroy me to come to that conclusion.
- ^
... (read more)I probably do think that Manifund is not an easy safe org for your sweet
For reference, see how this was covered in The Argument (an explicitly progressive Substack news magazine intended to not be ragebaity but to still show disagreements where they exist). This is roughly the nicest coverage this event will ever get.
Note: It is only covered very briefly before the paywall. I think it will still be useful for people to read.
- Would you be able to speak more on why you decided to announce this publicly at all, rather than continue to use a pseudonym for Caroline and keep her away from outward-facing roles?
- Why do you believe that the EA-wide and Manifund-specific harms you’ve already acknowledged, are worthwhile to incur, and to what end?
- Do you believe there is some positive signalling value to be gained from announcing this that offsets the negative signalling?
- Did you specifically trade off broader harms to EA’s reputation in order to advance Manifund’s own reputation? (My s
... (read more)We chose to announce it today because we figured we weren't going to be able to keep it under wraps forever; we didn't want to anyways, per Manifund's spirit of transparency; she was visiting town this week and in-person discussion/collaboration made the announcement easier; and my wife is due to give birth ~5 days and I didn't want to worry about the announcement while on paternity leave.
This is deeply problematic. I’m glad others in the community are noticing concerns here.
Strongly agree with titotal's comments, Zachary Robinson's comments, etc. Has anyone with relevant background reviewed Caroline's code commits and comments that Austin linked to in the post yet? An LLM I pointed it at found various issues with it and some of them seemed potentially serious. I don't think that evidence of serious bugs would change Austin's mind at this point, but maybe it could be helpful for others to know about.
I'm worried this means that my org could now be taking on an unacceptable degree of counterparty, governance, and reputational risk.
This could potentially affect our funding if there's any evidence of a relationship; good governance and risk management practices are a documented condition of some of our larger grants.
Without commenting on this specific case, I think society in general is bad at dealing with people who have made large mistakes, especially former criminals.
I'm sad that PR concerns and risk aversion are legitimate reasons not to do (much) better.
To be clear: I don't condone crime, and FTX's leadership committed serious fraud.
My original comment was a bit unkind—wrote something else after calming down a bit
what