Principles

We aim to protect future generations

Everyone’s welfare matters. This conviction motivates the FTX Foundation’s work to lift people from poverty and prevent animal suffering.

This same conviction underlies the Future Fund’s concern for future generations. Humanity’s future could be vast. Our species could survive for hundreds of millions of years, until the Earth is no longer habitable, or for even longer. Countless people might lead lives of flourishing or misery—or never live at all—depending on what humanity does today.

We want to fund projects with clear answers to the question: “How will this project improve humanity’s odds of surviving and flourishing for thousands of years or longer?”

For more on the FTX Foundation’s work on global poverty and animal suffering, see FTX Community. For more on the FTX Foundation’s dedicated work on climate issues, see FTX Climate. For more on concern for future generations, we recommend What We Owe The Future as well as introductions from the Centre for Effective Altruism, Our World in Data, 80,000 Hours, and Wikipedia.

We believe this is a crucial time in human history

The last few centuries have seen unprecedented technological progress. If we act wisely, we could end poverty, protect our climate, and cure debilitating disease. The future could be extraordinarily bright.

At the same time, our species is becoming powerful enough to destroy itself, or to veer permanently off course. Nuclear weapons have already given us unprecedented destructive power. Advanced biological weapons or misaligned AI systems could kill billions, or wipe out our species altogether. And even if we survive, new forms of surveillance, weaponry, and social control could crush human freedom and flourishing. 

We think the choices humanity makes this century could determine what future we get.

For more on these ideas, we recommend The Precipice and the Most Important Century series.

We want to fund ambitious people and projects

We’re especially excited about launching and supporting ambitious practical ventures, whether nonprofit or for-profit. We hope to engage with a wide range of people: entrepreneurs, executives, engineers, policy experts, journalists, filmmakers, academics, students, and other people with ideas, skills, and drive that could help safeguard the future.  

We’re willing to fail often in order to succeed at scale

It won’t be easy to get traction on the problems we care about. For every one of our efforts that succeeds, many will fail. But that’s okay with us. We aim to maximize the expected value of our philanthropic spending. We’re excited to fund projects that could have a tremendous positive impact, even if their probability of success is low.

To learn more about expected value reasoning and our general decision-making framework, we recommend Bayesian Mindset and The Logic of Decision by Richard Jeffrey.