EA had a fairly easy time in the media for a while which probably made its "leadership" a bit careless. The EA foundation didn't start to seriously disassociate itself from SBF until the collapse of FTX made his fraudulent activity publicly apparent.
But mostly, people (especially rich people) fucking hate it when you tell them they could be saving lives instead of buying a slightly nicer house. That (it seems to me) is why eg. MOMA / Harvard / The British Museum etc get to accept millions of dollars of drug dealer money and come out unscathed, whereas "EA took money from somebody who was subsequently convicted of fraud" gets presented as a decisive indicator of EA's moral character. It's also, I think, the reason you seem to have ended up thinking EA is anti-tax and anti-USAID.
I feel like I need to say, there's also a whole thing about EA leadership being obsessed with AI risk, which (at least at the time) most people thought was nuts. I wasn't really happy with the amount of money (especially SBF money) that went into that, but a large majority of EA money was still going into very defensible life-saving causes.
EA had a fairly easy time in the media for a while which probably made its "leadership" a bit careless. The EA foundation didn't start to seriously disassociate itself from SBF until the collapse of FTX made his fraudulent activity publicly apparent.
But mostly, people (especially rich people) fucking hate it when you tell them they could be saving lives instead of buying a slightly nicer house. That (it seems to me) is why eg. MOMA / Harvard / The British Museum etc get to accept millions of dollars of drug dealer money and come out unscathed, whereas "EA took money from somebody who was subsequently convicted of fraud" gets presented as a decisive indicator of EA's moral character. It's also, I think, the reason you seem to have ended up thinking EA is anti-tax and anti-USAID.
I feel like I need to say, there's also a whole thing about EA leadership being obsessed with AI risk, which (at least at the time) most people thought was nuts. I wasn't really happy with the amount of money (especially SBF money) that went into that, but a large majority of EA money was still going into very defensible life-saving causes.
Edit: I made a few edits, sorry