56 claims in “philanthropy”
The Waking Up Foundation supports effective charities, which can be consulted at wakingup.com/foundation, and Peter Singer's organization, The Life You Can Save, also recommends effective charities.
Grantham's foundation has written checks totaling approximately $1 billion (to be completed by end of year or mid-next year) addressing resource scarcity, climate change, and toxicity, representing a major personal commitment to addressing existential risks despite doubts about solutions.
Klarman has pledged all royalties from the updated Security Analysis and recent MasterClass to three organizations working on diversity in investment management: SEO, Lighted Pathways, and Girls Who Invest.
It is extremely difficult to give away money for the reality of good rather than mere appearance of good, suggesting most philanthropy is performative rather than impactful.
Over 90% of Grantham's wealth has gone to his foundation for environmental protection, and the foundation operates as 'shock troops' making aggressive new investments in renewable energy, clean technology research, and new enterprises to address climate change
Grantham has donated over 90% of his wealth to his foundation for environmental protection, and the foundation operates as 'shock troops' making aggressive new investments, pioneering research, and helping new enterprises get off the ground.
Asness has become skeptical about higher education as a charitable focus area and has questioned University of Pennsylvania's positions on Israel/Hamas, moving away from educational giving despite previously supporting multiple institutions.
Asness finds great joy in effective philanthropy and also finds it sad when he later realizes that philanthropic donations were ineffective, suggesting he feels responsibility for making good use of resources accumulated through successful investing.
Asness and his wife don't use quantitative approaches (like optimizing charitable Sharpe ratios) when allocating to charities, instead being willing to make concentrated bets on specific causes they believe in, contrary to their professional diversification practices.
Evaluating successful philanthropic outcomes is difficult because it's not just the outcome but whether that outcome represented the best use of the money—measuring effectiveness across different charitable interventions is challenging and requires ongoing re-evaluation.
Asness cites Children of Fallen Patriots (founded by David and Cynthia Kim, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger) as an example of a charity where he is certain the work is valuable—they send children of service members killed in the line of duty to college.
Asness uses Charity Navigator and similar tools to screen out clearly wasteful organizations (those with very high overhead or salary ratios), treating this as a minimum standard rather than a sufficient condition for philanthropic value.
Asness supports Children of Fallen Patriots, a Greenwich charity started by David and Cynthia Kim (David is a former Army Ranger and West Point graduate) that sends children of servicemen killed in duty or training accidents to college, which he calls an 'outlier' where he's certain it's a very good use of charitable funds.
Asness uses tools like Charity Navigator (checking overhead ratios and whether donations go to programs) as 'table stakes' for evaluating charities—avoiding those spending 80% on salaries—but even good overhead doesn't guarantee optimal use of funds.
Asness and his wife employ someone to continuously re-evaluate their charitable giving, recognizing philanthropy as 'a responsibility that comes with getting lucky in life,' but admit they have 'no magic answer' beyond extensive research and 'sweat equity.'
Asness has backed away from supporting higher education institutions despite it being an obvious choice, questioning whether universities with massive endowments (40-50 billion dollars) are actually good uses of charitable dollars, and citing a conflict with UPenn over their positions on Israel and Hamas.
Griffin once bid $8 million at a Robin Hood event for a Blue Origin flight to space, and donated the seat to a schoolteacher rather than using it himself.
Pabrai gives away approximately 2% of his wealth annually to the Dakshana Foundation, which provides food and services to underprivileged members of Indian society to enable them to attend elite institutions.
When Monish Pabrai launched Dakshana in 2007 with net worth over $50 million, he committed to giving 2% annually (cloning Warren Buffett's giving formula), which provided at least $1 million per year and enough 'ammunition' to do something meaningful; he fully expected to lose money for 10 years before gaining traction in year 11.
Dakshana Foundation operates on high-risk, high-return philanthropy principles similar to venture capital, not the low-risk, high-return approach of for-profit investing; the foundation accepts a high probability of failure because if the model works, it moves the needle significantly.
Dakshana Foundation achieved traction much faster than expected (within weeks rather than 10 years), found great leaders, discovered a working model, and formed partnerships with the Indian government, with negligible financial losses—Pabrai attributes this to luck rather than superior planning.
Gundlach is committed to 'a couple of terrible enterprises that basically need a lot of money,' which is a reason to work so money can be directed to meaningful causes rather than 'some rathole of administrative waste.'
Justin Sun's $4.6 million dinner contribution to the Glide Foundation was very generous and will buy many meals and beds for people in San Francisco, showing that his interest in Bitcoin did not change Buffett's view but the dinner was pleasant and civil.
Bragg has created a significant foundation through an estate freeze structure, keeping a portion of assets for himself while directing substantial wealth to public good; this gives him motivation to keep working (building foundation assets) rather than working to accumulate personal wealth.
Druckenmiller and Fiona did not want to give to the arts despite appreciating them, because arts are better supported relative to their utility to society, so they focused on at-risk youth, education, the environment, and health.
Rubinstein received criticism from the New York Post for funding restoration of Monticello and Montpelier, with critics claiming he was supporting 'woke' ideology because the tours now mention that Jefferson and Madison were slave owners, though the tours do not primarily emphasize slavery.
Dalio's philanthropic interests focus on two main areas: (1) ocean exploration, which he finds personally compelling, and (2) the education of disengaged and disconnected students—those who would not otherwise get through high school—which is important to him and his wife.
Total non-governmental spending on nuclear risk reduction is only around $30 million per year—including all organizations like the Plowshares Fund—and the field is contracting because the largest funder, the MacArthur Foundation, exited in 2020 after concluding it couldn't see a line of sight to its big-bet goal, leaving dedicated organizations starved for cash on a problem of existential scale.
Public commitment to the giving pledge has had measurable impact: 1,210 pledges have come from people following Sam Harris's podcast, moving over $30 million in donations and translating into thousands of lives saved.
Despite the huge reputational hit from the Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX collapse, the underlying influence of effective altruism ideas has continued growing—money moved to effective nonprofits grew about 50% over the last year to nearly $2 billion annually across both large and small donors, Giving What We Can pledges grew 20-30% year-on-year, and movement engagement via conferences is growing healthily.
Mentioning specific charities on the podcast produced large knock-on donations: GiveWell reported about $3.6 million directed or pledged through them, hundreds of listeners took the Giving What We Can 10% pledge, and ten companies followed Waking Up in taking a corporate pledge.
GiveWell is a website that makes evidence-based recommendations about where to give to charity to help the most people per dollar.
By recognizing his own limitations, Newmark has built 'networks of networks' and funded capable network-builders who execute on his behalf; this is more effective than retaining control and also functions as durable estate planning because the networks outlive him.
Two large lump-sum gifts to Ivy League universities were ineffective; the lesson is to give large amounts as multiyear grants paid out against milestones rather than as a single big check, so the money is used well.
Much excellent work is wasted because skilled practitioners are poor communicators; work is far less valuable if you can't talk about it effectively, so funders should push grantees to plan for good communications rather than rely on institutional marketing.
Rather than building an institution that lasts forever and risks a century of institutional decay submerging your name, it is better to do really good, interesting work concentrated in 10, 20, or 50 years and let that be the legacy; a community winding down after it outlives its usefulness is not a bad thing.
For a very long-lived endowment, growing the assets is easy (just put it in the stock market); the hard problem is ensuring whoever distributes the funds shares the original donor's intent—and additionally that long-term planning is dangerous because you cannot know what will matter in a thousand years, as impact is highly contextual to its time.
A cryptic, distributed strategy of 'arming the rebels'—quietly funding many individuals without a named foundation, as in the Thielverse—is a more effective way to spread one's power among elites than either explicit community-building or a donor-centric named foundation, partly because being hard to define makes it more influential.
Philanthropy is not really about altruism; the meaningful part is what motivates elites to move from self-focus to engaging public society, which begins with seeking to control the three arms of the public sector—media, academia, and government—making it more about maintaining one's own power than altruistic whitewashing.
Wealthy people increasingly conduct philanthropy through LLCs (Emerson Collective, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) and donor-advised funds rather than traditional 501(c)(3) foundations, because LLCs offer far more flexibility—allowing them to fund companies, individuals, and nonprofits rather than only other nonprofits.
A standard but flawed approach to choosing charities looks at overhead and the proportion of giving that reaches recipients, rather than at efficiency, efficacy, or actual impact—a method many charity-rating websites use and that distinguishes them from GiveWell's impact-based selection.
GiveWell's early recommendation of PSI rested on taking the organization's self-reported distribution numbers at face value—numbers that were true but not rigorously gathered—reflecting an over-enthusiasm for quantification as the path to the best answer, a mistake that pushed GiveWell toward critical evaluation of data rather than data alone.
GiveWell takes seriously 'Room for More Funding'—how much money an organization can use well—and would not put an organization on its list that could only absorb $100,000 well if listing it might channel $10 million, tracking this over time and reducing support when organizations have already received large funding.
GiveWell's 'Change Our Mind' contest, offering prizes to people who found errors in its public analysis, drew more than 50 high-quality submissions including from prestigious academics, surfaced small errors across programs, and—most importantly—revealed GiveWell had been insufficiently transparent about the uncertainty inherent in its analysis.
GiveWell deliberately directs the vast majority of funds to interventions where it can learn empirically whether it was right or wrong and improve, creating feedback loops; this leads it to avoid high-risk opportunities like funding African think tanks for pro-growth policy, not because such bets are bad but because measurable learning is GiveWell's distinctive competence.
GiveWell sometimes supports a person or program based on a strong track record—a 'good bet'—even without a quantified estimate of the good that will result, as when it funded Mushfiq Mobarak's Y-RISE center studying the science of scaling programs.
Publishing all research and reasoning on GiveWell's website both imposes rigor on the organization's own thinking and enables outsiders to understand, evaluate, and critique its work where they disagree.
When Hassenfeld and Karnofsky sought information on what charities accomplish per dollar given, they found that detailed, useful data on charitable impact simply did not exist, with charities unable to justify claims like '$20 provides a child water for life.'
When a program's quantified cost-effectiveness number lands near the threshold (e.g., 7 or 13 versus 10), GiveWell relies on qualitative considerations: unmodeled upside (supporting a young person/organization that could grow), confidence the organization will be transparent about what's working and failing, and the track record of the people and organization—pushing borderline decisions up or down.
To become a GiveWell top charity, an organization must meet three criteria: evidence strong enough that it is significantly more likely than not to be having large effect (high confidence, not a 25% chance of large effect); estimated impact per dollar exceeding GiveWell's current funding threshold (currently 10x direct cash transfers); and having received significant prior funding (at least $10 million for at least a year) so GiveWell has experience with it.