It's interesting that this article paints SBF's actions here as reflective of EA, when from what I've seen EA as a whole tends to be more skeptical about spending money on political campaigns (for example, ideas like [1]).
Does someone have a summary? I don't have time digging through the dinner preferences of some random person ("It was after 11 p.m. on Monday evening, and Sam Bankman-Fried was concocting some potato-pepper-onion fake meat stir-fry in his Bahamas kitchen...") to even figure out what the article is about.
SBF founded a SuperPAC that's focused on future pandemic prevention/mitigation. He supported many candidates and a ballot measure in CA. One candidate who he put particular support behind was Flynn, a house candidate in Oregon who his SuperPAC spent $12 million on and who lost his primary with only a third of the vote. A Pelosi associated SuperPAC also supporting Flynn, suggesting SBF may be a major player in the Democratic Party establishment going forward. Also SBF seems to at least partially justify his spending through an effective altruist lens.
The impact:
> Spending $12 million on a single candidate who lost badly is, by no definition, a success. S.B.F. didn’t score a Peter Thiel-like victory and successfully buy a seat in Congress for an ally. But you get the feeling that S.B.F., like Thiel, will be among the most ambitious members of the new establishment attempting—in this case, expensively—to recast the world in his image.
What does pandemic preparedness mean in this context? Most countries that fared badly due to COVID did so because of policy decisions, not lack of materials. We could invest in faster vaccine development, but again the uptake of vaccines in the US was hampered by communication and policy decisions.
Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried lost big on Tuesday despite airdropping a historic sum into a congressional race in Oregon. What was he thinking? The logic, the math, and the aftermath.
