It was as if the Wright Brothers sold air miles to finance inventing the airplane, in the words of Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine.

The heist helped Kim Jong Un pay for test launches of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. officials. Instead of providing a new way for poor people to earn cash, Axie Infinity funneled their savings to a dictator’s weapons program.

told him it was pretty common for writers to write about, say, presidential politics without serving as president, or baseball without being able to hit a fastball. But he wasn’t convinced.

“These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” Bannon said.

As one New York Times headline put it in January 2018, “Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not.”

But once it caught on in the Philippines, Axie’s user base increased exponentially—exactly the kind of growth venture capitalists are looking for. The game signed up 61,000 new players in May 2021, 139,000 in June, and 475,000 in July. By that October, about two million people were playing the game every day, most of them in the Philippines. Sky Ma

Sitting across from Bankman-Fried and listening to him talk about effective altruism, I couldn’t help thinking that pushing people to gamble seemed at odds with his pledge to have a positive impact on the world.

Singer’s thought experiment, which he called “the Drowning Child,” became influential within the school of philosophy known as utilitarianism. Utilitarians argue that the proper action is the one that maximizes the world’s collective well-being.

“You start with a company that builds a box,” Bankman-Fried said. “They probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in thirty-eight days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does, or pretend it does literally nothing.” Bankman-Fried explained that it would