‘Effective altruist’ Sam Bankman-Fried supposedly wanted to buy the Pacific state of Nauru to build a doomsday bunker. Meanwhile, in the real world, quite a few other things need fixing
Do you have a plan for the apocalypse? Have you sat down and developed a strategy to ride out a doomsday event? Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and his younger brother, Gabriel, certainly seem to have done so. According to details of a new lawsuit filed against FTX, the tech bros weren’t content with a run-of-the-mill billionaire’s luxury underground bunker. Nope, they had big plans to purchase the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru as insurance against the world ending.
How would that work? Alas, details are sparse. The court filings simply allege that Gabriel Bankman-Fried wrote a memo to an unnamed FTX official suggesting they buy the island “in order to construct a ‘bunker/shelter’ that would be used for ‘some event where 50-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive’”.
