Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy

Nadia Asparouhova places SBF in the finance crowd rather than among startup or crypto founders. She sees him as tied to the utilitarianism behind effective altruism, and she argues that effective altruism itself is closer to the Wall Street elite mindset than to the startup mindset, even though many people associate it with tech. She says this is widely misunderstood about him.

She contrasts two elite types. The Davos and Wall Street cohort stresses quantitative thinking, measured efficiency and a globalist, United Nations-style vision. The Y Combinator-era startup cohort made its money on non-obvious bets on talented people, cared less about credentials, and popularized the young founder with no industry background who upends an industry.

I think we forget how commonplace this trope is of the young founder in a dorm room.

Dwarkesh asks whether Jeff Bezos, who came from a hedge fund and built Amazon after seeing internet usage rise, belongs with the old finance crowd. Nadia calls him a hybrid: AWS kicked off the 2010s startups, and his recent conduct fits the startup elite. He criticizes Davos-type institutions, pokes fun at mainstream media for doubting AWS, and, in her example, recruits academic scientists at high salaries at what the transcript calls The Altos Institute. Her evidence is his public behavior, with no wider data offered.

Nadia worries that the children of today's tech billionaires will become aristocrats. Aristocratic elites inherit wealth and are socialized into public stewardship. Meritocratic elites rise through the American dream but are not taught what to do with a fortune, so hoarding is easy, and their heirs inherit money without that socialization. She links this to a trend of donors planning to spend down fortunes within their lifetimes or a set number of decades after death.