Manifund hires Caroline Ellison while fighting FTX over $1.5M
Manifund, a charity founded by Austin Chen that focuses on AI and effective altruism causes, has created quite the stir by admitting to hiring disgraced CEO of Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison. While the controversy is fascinating, the history behind it is detailed, lengthy, and bizarre. In March of 2022 Chen’s organization, then called Manifold Markets, applied for $500,000 in funding from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of FTX, to setup Manifold For Charity (now known as Manifund). Most notably, two important EA figures helped run the Future Fund, and therefore helped approve Chen’s grant application: William MacAskill and Leopold Aschenbrenner. Six months later, FTX and Alameda Research were declaring bankruptcy and its CEOs, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, were being ushered to jail. Former FTX member Leopold Aschenbrenner’s $20B AI fund blows up Read more: FTX’s Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang hit with five-year trading ban...