Who we are

The Future Fund is funded primarily by Sam Bankman-Fried, with major contributions from Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh. We make grants to nonprofits and individuals, and investments in socially-impactful companies.

When Sam was 20 years old, he set out to make as much money as he could, in order to give away everything he earned to charity. He initially worked as a trader, then founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. Now he wants to use the wealth he’s generated to empower people and projects that are doing the most to make positive, long-lasting change. He’s hoping to donate over a billion dollars to great organizations over the next few years, and more after that.

The Future Fund is a project of the FTX Foundation, a philanthropic collective. For the Foundation's other work, on problems such as global health, animal welfare, and climate change, please see here.

Team

Nick Beckstead

Nick Beckstead is the CEO of the FTX Foundation. Nick has been working as a grantmaker and researcher in the effective altruism community since 2009. Prior to joining the team, Nick was an early employee at Open Philanthropy, where he worked for seven years. Before that, he was a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, completed a Ph.D. in moral philosophy at Rutgers University, and helped launch the Centre for Effective Altruism.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

Leopold Aschenbrenner is an economist affiliated with the University of Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, and he previously worked at the Forethought Foundation, researching long-run economic growth and existential risk. Before that, Leopold graduated as valedictorian from Columbia, where he studied mathematics, statistics, and economics.

Avital Balwit

Avital Balwit graduated from University of Virginia with highest honors with a degree in Political and Social Thought. Previously, she worked as a research scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and then managed a political campaign. She won the Jefferson Scholarship and the Rhodes Scholarship.

William MacAskill

William MacAskill is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute. As one of the progenitors of the effective altruism movement, he cofounded Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s the author of Doing Good Better, Moral Uncertainty, and What We Owe The Future.

Ketan Ramakrishnan

Ketan Ramakrishnan received a JD from Yale and a DPhil in philosophy from Oxford. He is the co-editor of Principles and Persons and Ethics and Existence (Oxford University Press).

Board

Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Sam has been drawn to the philosophy of effective altruism for much of his life, donating to charitable causes that focus on climate change, voter registration, global poverty mitigation, pandemic and biorisk preparedness, and artificial intelligence safety, among other issues. He believes in doing as much good as possible and plans to donate the great majority of his fortune to effective organizations and causes.

Caroline Ellison

Caroline Ellison is the co-CEO of Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency trading firm. Before joining Alameda in 2018, Caroline worked at Jane Street as a trader on the equities desk. She's been involved in the effective altruism community since college and started working in finance with the goal of earning money to donate to good causes.

Gary Wang

Gary Wang is the CTO of FTX. Prior to founding FTX, he was a software engineer at Google, where he built systems to aggregate prices across millions of flights, decreasing latency and memory usage by over 50%. He graduated from MIT with a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science.

Nishad Singh

Nishad Singh is Director of Engineering at FTX. He was previously a software engineer at Facebook, where he worked on applied machine learning. Nishad graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been involved with the effective altruism community since college and is committed to doing as much good as possible with his time and resources.