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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anduril Industries.md
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---
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category: "Private Organization"
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tags:
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- Organization
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- Anduril
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- DefenseContractor
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- PalmerLuckey
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- FoundersFund
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- PeterThiel
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- Pentagon
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- Lattice
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- AutonomousSystems
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alias:
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- Anduril Industries Inc.
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summary: "Anduril Industries is a defense-technology contractor founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and Palantir Technologies alumni Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen, backed by Founders Fund, that builds the Lattice autonomous-systems platform and autonomous hardware for the Pentagon and allied militaries, and was valued at 30.5 billion dollars in its 2025 Series G round."
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location: "Costa Mesa, California (headquarters)"
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created: 2026-06-17
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updated: 2026-06-17
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---
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Anduril Industries is an American defense-technology contractor founded in 2017 by [[Palmer Luckey]] and a group of [[Palantir Technologies]] alumni including [[Brian Schimpf]], [[Trae Stephens]], [[Matt Grimm]], and [[Joe Chen]]. The company builds the [[Lattice (software platform)|Lattice]] software platform for fusing sensor data from autonomous systems into a single operating picture, and a range of autonomous hardware including the [[Ghost (drone)|Ghost]] and [[Altius (drone)|Altius]] unmanned aerial systems, the [[Fury (drone)|Fury]] autonomous fighter, the [[Dive-LD]] autonomous undersea vehicle, and the [[Sentry Tower]] ground-surveillance system. The company was valued at 30.5 billion dollars in a Series G funding round led by [[Founders Fund]] in 2025.[^1][^2]
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### The Palmer Luckey Founding and the Facebook Ouster
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Luckey founded Anduril in 2017 after his ouster from [[Facebook]], where he had been a cofounder of [[Oculus VR|Oculus]] following Facebook's 2014 acquisition of the virtual-reality company for approximately two billion dollars. The *Wall Street Journal* reported in 2018 that Luckey had been fired from Facebook in March 2017 over his political activity, specifically an approximately 10,000 dollar donation to the pro-[[Donald Trump|Trump]] organization [[Nimble America]] during the 2016 election and alleged ties to provocative social-media posts under a pseudonym. Luckey confirmed the firing in a 2019 CNBC interview, stating he had been terminated "for no reason at all" beyond the political donation.[^3][^4]
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The Anduril founding was the second act that followed the firing. Luckey's departure from the consumer-internet industry, on a political-donation controversy, coincided with his pivot to defense technology. The new company drew its technical leadership from the Palantir Technologies alumni network: Schimpf had been a Palantir engineering director, Stephens was a Founders Fund partner who had also worked at Palantir, and Grimm and Chen were Palantir alumni. The Palantir lineage supplied the data-fusion and government-contracting expertise that Luckey's hardware focus required.[^1][^5]
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### Founders Fund and the Investment Structure
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Founders Fund, the [[Peter Thiel]] venture firm, led Anduril's early funding rounds and remains its lead investor. Stephens is simultaneously a Founders Fund partner and Anduril's executive chairman, which means the lead investor and the company's board leadership are held by the same individual. Founders Fund led Anduril's Series G round in 2025, raising 2.5 billion dollars at a 30.5 billion dollar valuation, with a reported one billion dollars of the round coming from Founders Fund itself.[^2][^6]
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The Anduril-Founders Fund relationship applies the Thiel-network thesis that the Pentagon should procure from Silicon Valley-style commercial vendors rather than from the traditional defense primes ([[Lockheed Martin]], [[Raytheon]], [[Northrop Grumman]], [[Boeing]]). The investment thesis holds that the traditional primes have captured procurement through cost-plus contracting and slow development cycles, and that software-first commercial vendors can deliver autonomous systems at lower cost and faster iteration. The 30.5 billion dollar valuation makes Anduril the highest-valued private defense-technology company.[^2]
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### The Lattice Platform and the Product Line
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The Lattice software platform is built to fuse data from the company's own hardware and from third-party sensors into a single operational picture that a small number of operators can use to direct autonomous systems. The architecture mirrors the Palantir Gotham ontology approach (a common object model that maps disparate source data into a unified queryable structure) applied to the sensor-to-shooter problem rather than to the intelligence-analysis problem. The hardware line is built around the platform: the Ghost and Altius unmanned aerial systems, the Fury autonomous fighter, the Dive-LD undersea vehicle, and the Sentry Tower ground-surveillance system all feed into Lattice.[^1]
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Traditional defense procurement separates the platform (the aircraft, the vehicle, the sensor) from the software that operates it, with the Pentagon buying each from different vendors on separate contracts. Anduril bundles the hardware, the software, and the data fusion into a single vendor, which lets the company iterate the whole stack on commercial rather than defense-cycle timelines. The Replicator initiative, the Pentagon program to field thousands of low-cost autonomous systems, has been the principal public instance of this procurement model applied to Anduril hardware.[^1][^7]
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### Pentagon and Allied Contracts
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Anduril's public contract record includes the [[Special Operations Command]] contracts for Ghost drones, the [[Marine Corps]] and [[United Kingdom|UK]] [[Ministry of Defence]] contracts for Altius loitering munitions, and the participation in the Replicator initiative. The [[Ukraine]] war has been the largest operational test of the underlying thesis: Anduril and competitor autonomous systems have been used extensively by Ukrainian forces against Russian targets, and the company has publicly supplied systems to Ukraine outside the formal U.S. foreign-military-sales process.[^1][^7]
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The Ukraine deployment fed back into the product development cycle at a pace the traditional defense-contracting model does not permit. Anduril has cited the operational data from the conflict in its pitch for the Replicator and successor programs, and the use of Anduril hardware in the conflict is part of the public record of the defense-tech cluster's emergence as a procurement category distinct from the traditional primes.[^7]
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### Customs and Border Protection and the Sentry Tower Program
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[[U.S. Customs and Border Protection|CBP]] has deployed over 350 Sentry Towers along the U.S. southern border, covering approximately 30 percent of the southwest land border. The towers are self-powered, autonomous surveillance structures equipped with optical, thermal, and radar sensors integrated through the Lattice platform, autonomously detecting, classifying, and tracking objects of interest. CBP expanded the program under a 363 million dollar contract for 200 additional Extended Range Sentry Towers (XRST), 80-foot expeditionary structures with extended sensor range. The [[Electronic Frontier Foundation]] reported in April 2026 on opposition from a 62,000-resident California coastal community where an Anduril tower was slated for installation.[^8]
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The Sentry Tower program is the physical-surveillance layer of the border-enforcement pipeline that the Thiel-network firms supply. Palantir Technologies provides the back-end data integration, case management, and neighborhood-targeting through FALCON, ICM, ImmigrationOS, and the ELITE app. [[Clearview AI]] provides the facial-recognition identification from the surveillance imagery. The documented combination of Anduril (detection), Palantir (case management), and Clearview (facial identification) runs across the enforcement pipeline from border crossing through detention and deportation.[^8]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: For Anduril's product line, contract record, and operational deployments, see the company's own published materials at anduril.com and contemporaneous defense-trade press including *Defense News* and *Breaking Defense.*
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[^2]: "Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund." *NBC New York* (via Bloomberg), 2025. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/anduril-raises-funding-at-30-5-billion-valuation-in-round-led-by-founders-fund-chairman-says/6291304/
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[^3]: "Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do With Trump." *Wall Street Journal,* November 11, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump-1541965245
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[^4]: "Oculus founder: 'I got fired' from Facebook." *CNBC,* May 22, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/oculus-co-founder-i-got-fired-from-facebook-for-no-reason-at-all.html
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[^5]: Founders Fund. "Anduril" company page. https://foundersfund.com/company/anduril/
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[^6]: "Trae Stephens." *Forbes.* https://www.forbes.com/profile/trae-stephens/
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[^7]: For the Replicator initiative, Ukraine deployments, and the Pentagon autonomous-systems procurement record, see Department of Defense announcements and contemporaneous reporting in *Defense One* and *Politico*.
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[^8]: "Anduril Wins $363M CBP Contract for XR Sentry Towers." *Tectonic Defense.* https://www.tectonic-defense.com/anduril-wins-363m-cbp-contract-for-xr-sentry-towers/ ; "Anduril Surveillance Towers." *U.S. Customs and Border Protection.* https://www.cbp.gov/document/foia-record/anduril-surveillance-towers ; "California Coastal Community Must Reject CBP's AI-Powered Surveillance Tower." *EFF,* April 2026. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/california-coastal-community-must-reject-cbps-ai-powered-surveillance-tower
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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anonymous (collective).md
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---
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category: "Private Organization"
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tags:
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- Organization
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- Anonymous
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- Hacktivist
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- 4chan
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- LulzSec
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- Chanology
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- OperationPayback
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alias:
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- Anonymous (hacker group)
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- Anonymous collective
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summary: "Anonymous is a decentralized international hacktivist collective that originated on the 4chan imageboard in 2003, whose operations including Project Chanology (2008), Operation Payback (2010), and the LulzSec spin-off (2011) established the tactical repertoire of distributed online direct action that was later adopted by the alt-right and other political actors."
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start: 2003
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location: "Distributed (originated on 4chan)"
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created: 2026-06-18
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updated: 2026-06-18
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---
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Anonymous is a decentralized international collective of hacktivists that originated on the [[4chan]] imageboard in 2003. The collective has no formal leadership, no membership roster, and no single ideological program, and operates through the coordination of ad hoc operations under the shared banner. The early Anonymous operations ([[Project Chanology|Project Chanology]] in 2008, [[Operation Payback|Operation Payback]] in 2010) established the tactical repertoire of distributed online direct action, including the [[DDoS|distributed-denial-of-service]] attack, the coordinated swarm, the [[doxxing|doxxing]] campaign, and the mass-action framing of individual contributions as participation in a collective political act. The tactical repertoire developed by Anonymous was subsequently adopted, with different political content, by the [[alt-right]], by [[Gamergate]], and by the broader far-right online ecosystem of the 2014-2020 period.[^1][^2][^3]
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### Origins on 4chan and the Collective Form
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Anonymous emerged from the posting culture of 4chan, the imageboard created by [[Christopher Poole|moot]] (Christopher Poole) in 2003, where all posts were by default signed "Anonymous." The shared author name produced the collective identity: Anonymous was not a membership organization but a label claimed by anyone posting under the default name, and the early "operations" were coordinated on the /b/ (random) board as in-jokes and pranks. The movement's defining early document is the /b/ post "Rules of the Internet," which codified the imageboard norms of anonymity, lulz (schadenfreude-derived humor), and the refusal of earnest political framing.[^1][^3]
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The [[Dale Beran|Dale Beran]] analysis of the imageboard-to-politics pipeline traces how the Anonymous collective's early pranks (the [[Hal Turner|Hal Turner]] raids, the [[Habbo Hotel|Habbo Hotel]] raids) established the operational template that later operations applied to political targets. The key innovation was the distributed, leaderless structure: anyone could claim the Anonymous label and organize an operation, and the absence of formal leadership made the collective difficult to prosecute or infiltrate. The same structure was later the feature that permitted the alt-right and the Gamergate campaign to operate without identifiable leadership.[^3][^4]
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### Project Chanology (2008)
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Project Chanology was the first widely noted Anonymous operation directed at a political target. In January 2008, Anonymous organized a campaign against the [[Church of Scientology]] after the church attempted to suppress the circulation of an internal Tom Cruise interview through legal threats. The operation's [[YouTube]] declaration video, delivered in the synthesized voice that became the Anonymous signature, accumulated more than 1.7 million views. The campaign included DDoS attacks on Scientology websites, pranks, and a coordinated series of in-person protests outside Scientology centers worldwide on February 10 and March 15, 2008.[^2]
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Project Chanology marks the transition at which Anonymous moved from pranks to political operations. The campaign's combination of online attacks and real-world protest, its use of the [[V for Vendetta|V for Vendetta]] [[Guy Fawkes mask|Guy Fawkes mask]] as the public-facing symbol (drawn from the [[V for Vendetta (film)|2005 film]]), and its organizational structure (ad hoc coordination on 4chan, IRC, and the [[WhyWeProtest|WhyWeProtest]] forums) established the template for all subsequent Anonymous operations.[^2]
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### Operation Payback and the WikiLeaks Defense (2010)
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Operation Payback began in September 2010 as an Anonymous campaign against anti-piracy organizations, but expanded in December 2010 into the defense of [[WikiLeaks]] after the major U.S. payment processors ([[PayPal]], [[Visa]], [[Mastercard]]) and [[Amazon Web Services]] cut off services to WikiLeaks following the publication of the [[Cablegate|Cablegate]] diplomatic cables. Anonymous coordinated DDoS attacks against the payment processors and against [[Amazon|Amazon.com]], framing the action as a defense of free speech against corporate-state censorship.[^1]
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Operation Payback is where Anonymous's tactics first intersected the WikiLeaks disclosure infrastructure and the broader state-press conflict. The same operational infrastructure subsequently fed into the [[LulzSec|LulzSec]] spin-off (2011) and into the [[Operation Anti-Security|AntiSec]] movement, which targeted law enforcement and intelligence agencies and whose arrests and prosecutions ran through 2012.[^1]
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### LulzSec, Sabu, and the FBI Infiltration (2011)
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LulzSec (Lulz Security) was a six-person Anonymous spin-off that conducted a 50-day hacking spree in 2011, targeting the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], [[Sony]], [[PBS]], the [[Serious Organised Crime Agency|UK Serious Organised Crime Agency]], and the [[Arizona Department of Public Safety|Arizona Department of Public Safety]]. The group's operations were conducted "for the lulz" rather than under a political banner, though the targeting of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies placed the campaign in the political-hacktivist lineage. The group's leader, [[Hector Monsegur|Hector "Sabu" Monsegur]], was arrested in June 2011 and turned FBI informant, and the subsequent cooperation led to the arrests of the other LulzSec members across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland through 2012.[^1]
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The Sabu case was the first documented FBI use of a turned hacktivist as a cooperating informant against the collective, and the pattern of arrest-and-inform became the recurring law-enforcement response to Anonymous-linked operations. The collective's decentralized structure, which had made it difficult to prosecute, also made individual members vulnerable to isolation and turn once identified.[^1]
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### Gamergate and the Alt-Right Adoption
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The Anonymous tactical repertoire was adopted by Gamergate in 2014, with the critical difference that the political content shifted from the Anonymous-left hacktivism of the 2008-2012 period to a right-wing cultural-reactionary campaign. The same imageboards (4chan and [[8chan]]), the same operational structures (ad hoc coordination on [[IRC]] and the boards, distributed swarm harassment, doxxing), and the same collective identity (Anonymous-as-label rather than Anonymous-as-membership) hosted both the Anonymous operations and the Gamergate campaign. The Beran analysis documents the continuity, and the [[Guardian]] and [[Data & Society Research Institute|Data & Society]] reporting extends the line to the alt-right and the 2016 [[Donald Trump|Trump]] campaign.[^3][^5][^6]
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The [[Breitbart News|Breitbart]]-[[Mike Cernovich|Cernovich]]-alt-right media infrastructure that amplified Gamergate overlapped with the [[Thiel Influence Network|Thiel]] political projects of the 2016-2024 period. The overlap runs through shared media infrastructure and shared platforms rather than through direct organizational contact.[^5][^6]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: For the Anonymous chronology, Project Chanology, Operation Payback, LulzSec, and the Sabur case, see the contemporaneous press (the *New York Times*, *The Guardian*, *Wired*) and the CNBC overview "What is Anonymous? From 4chan to cyberattacks."
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[^2]: "Hackers declare war on Scientologists." *The Guardian,* February 4, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/04/news
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[^3]: Beran, Dale. *It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office.* St. Martin's Press, 2019.
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[^4]: "Hacktivism: Anonymous." *Purdue cyberTAP.* https://cyber.tap.purdue.edu/blog/articles/hacktivism-anonymous/
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[^5]: Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis. "Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online." *Data & Society Research Institute,* 2017. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf
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[^6]: "What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'." *The Guardian,* December 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump
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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anthropic.md
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---
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category: "Private Organization"
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tags:
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- Organization
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- Anthropic
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- ArtificialIntelligence
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- EffectiveAltruism
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- FTX
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- AISafety
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summary: "Anthropic is an artificial-intelligence company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu around the goal of safe AI development, whose 2022 Series B was led by a 500 million dollar investment from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX before its fraud collapse."
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location: "San Francisco, California"
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created: 2026-06-19
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updated: 2026-06-19
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---
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Anthropic is an artificial-intelligence company founded in May 2021 by seven former [[OpenAI]] researchers, led by the siblings [[Dario Amodei]] (chief executive) and [[Daniela Amodei]] (president), who left OpenAI over disagreements about its direction and its balance between commercialization and safety. The founders came out of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and built the company explicitly around the thesis that advanced AI should be developed with extreme caution, the same existential-risk concern that runs through the [[Rationalist Community]] and the institutions [[Peter Thiel]] funded through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]]. Its 2022 funding round was led by a 500 million dollar investment from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] months before his [[FTX]] exchange collapsed in fraud.[^1][^2]
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### Founding and Governance
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The Amodeis and their cofounders, including [[Tom Brown]], [[Jack Clark]], [[Jared Kaplan]], [[Sam McCandlish]], and [[Chris Olah]], incorporated Anthropic as a public-benefit corporation and built an unusual governance structure, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, intended to give a body insulated from shareholders the power to appoint directors and to weight safety over profit. The arrangement mirrored the nonprofit-control structure that produced OpenAI's 2023 board crisis. Daniela Amodei is married to [[Holden Karnofsky]], cofounder of the effective-altruism organizations [[GiveWell]] and [[Open Philanthropy]], which was an early Anthropic funder; Karnofsky later joined the company.[^2][^3]
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The Long-Term Benefit Trust was formally established in September 2023, holding a special class of stock (Class T shares) that gives it authority to elect and remove Anthropic directors on time- and funding-based milestones, phasing up to a majority of the board within four years. Its five founding trustees were [[Neil Buddy Shah]] of the [[Clinton Health Access Initiative]] as chair, [[Jason Matheny]] of the [[RAND Corporation]], [[Kanika Bahl]] of [[Evidence Action]], the alignment researcher [[Paul Christiano]] of the [[Alignment Research Center]], and [[Zach Robinson]] of [[Effective Ventures US]], several of them figures from the effective-altruism and AI-safety world. Matheny stepped down in December 2023 to avoid conflicts with RAND's policy work, and Christiano left in April 2024 to lead AI safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute, with the trust later adding [[Richard Fontaine]] of the Center for a New American Security and the former California Supreme Court justice [[Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar]].[^6][^7]
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### FTX Funding and the Effective-Altruism Tie
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In 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried invested approximately 500 million dollars in Anthropic's Series B through his trading firm [[Alameda Research]], taking about 86 percent of the round and roughly 8 percent of the company; the money came from FTX customer deposits. Dario Amodei has said he kept Bankman-Fried off the board and limited him to non-voting shares because of "red flags." After the FTX fraud was exposed and Bankman-Fried convicted, the FTX bankruptcy estate sold the stake, and Amodei moved to distance himself and the company from the effective-altruism label even as the founders remained products of that milieu. Later funding rounds drew on [[Google]] and [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]], carrying the company's valuation into the tens of billions of dollars.[^1][^4][^5]
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The April 2022 Series B that Bankman-Fried led raised 580 million dollars at a 4-billion-dollar valuation, with FTX cofounder [[Caroline Ellison]] also named in the round. The FTX estate disposed of the 8 percent stake in 2024 as Anthropic's value climbed: a March 2024 agreement sold about two-thirds of the shares (29.5 million shares to 24 buyers) for 884 million dollars, with ATIC Third International Investment Company, tied to the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund [[Mubadala]], buying roughly 500 million dollars of it and [[Jane Street Capital]], Fidelity-managed funds, and HOF Capital among the rest; a June 2024 sale of the remaining shares brought in over 450 million dollars. Anthropic's May 2023 Series C, led by [[Spark Capital]] with Google, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, had raised 450 million dollars, and the stake FTX paid 500 million dollars for would have been worth several billion at later valuations.[^8][^9]
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### The Funding Rounds
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Anthropic's first outside capital was a 124-million-dollar Series A in May 2021 led by [[Jaan Tallinn]], the Estonian programmer who had made his fortune as a founding engineer of [[Skype]], with participation from the investor [[James McClave]], [[Dustin Moskovitz]], [[Eric Schmidt]], and the [[Center for Emerging Risk Research]]. The lead and several of the backers came from the same effective-altruism and existential-risk donor world as the founders. The 580-million-dollar Series B that Bankman-Fried led the following year was followed in May 2023 by a 450-million-dollar Series C led by Spark Capital.[^10]
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From 2023 the valuation climbed through a rapid sequence of rounds funded increasingly by the largest technology firms and the late-stage growth funds. A March 2025 round of 3.5 billion dollars, led by [[Lightspeed Venture Partners]], valued the company at 61.5 billion dollars. In May 2026 it closed a 65-billion-dollar round, the largest in its history, at a 965-billion-dollar post-money valuation, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, [[Sequoia Capital]], Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital, briefly making it the most valuable private company in the artificial-intelligence industry, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic reported an annualized revenue run rate of about 47 billion dollars and confidentially filed for an initial public offering in mid-2026.[^11][^12]
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### The Amazon and Google Stakes
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The two largest strategic investors are Amazon and Google, which are also Anthropic's principal cloud and chip suppliers. Amazon committed up to 4 billion dollars in September 2023, beginning with 1.25 billion, and added a further 4 billion in November 2024 to reach 8 billion dollars in total, becoming Anthropic's primary training partner through [[Amazon Web Services]] and its Trainium chips. Google, which had put roughly 300 million dollars into the company for about a 10 percent stake in early 2023, committed up to 2 billion dollars later that year and more than 1 billion again in January 2025, holding a stake reported at around 14 percent and contractually capped near 15 percent.[^13][^14]
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The arrangement is partly circular: much of the money the two companies invest returns to them as payment for the computing capacity Anthropic rents to train and run its models. By 2026 the appreciation of the two stakes was large enough that the financial press reported the Anthropic holdings accounted for roughly half of the AI-related investment gains Google and Amazon booked in some quarters, gains the companies had not realized because they had not sold the shares.[^14][^15]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: "From 500 million to 30 billion: SBF, in prison, has invested in the most valuable company in the AI era," on the FTX/Alameda investment in Anthropic. https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/019d08f7-792c-70db-a0d3-5654dd2b2eaf
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[^2]: "Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival, has a weird structure too," *Slate,* December 2023, on Anthropic's effective-altruism origins and the Long-Term Benefit Trust. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/anthropic-openai-board-trust-effective-altruism.html
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[^3]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on the founding and the Karnofsky and Open Philanthropy ties. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6
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[^4]: "Dario Amodei's Ideological Reckoning: How Anthropic's CEO Is Distancing Himself From the Movement That Made Him," *WebProNews,* on the post-FTX distancing from effective altruism. https://www.webpronews.com/dario-amodeis-ideological-reckoning-how-anthropics-ceo-is-distancing-himself-from-the-movement-that-made-him/
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[^5]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction November 2, 2023; FTX estate disposition of the Anthropic stake reported in subsequent bankruptcy filings.
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[^6]: "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," Anthropic, September 2023, on the Class T shares, the four-year board-majority phase-in, and the founding trustees. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
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[^7]: "Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust," Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, October 28, 2023, on the trustee roster and the Matheny and Christiano departures. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/10/28/anthropic-long-term-benefit-trust/
|
||||
[^8]: "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE," *CNBC,* March 25, 2024, on the 29.5 million shares, 24 buyers, ATIC/Mubadala, Jane Street, Fidelity, and HOF Capital. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-stake-in-startup-anthropic-for-884-million.html
|
||||
[^9]: "Anthropic raises $3.5 billion with new funding round," Techzine, on the April 2022 Series B (580 million dollars, 4-billion valuation, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison) and the May 2023 Spark Capital Series C. https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/129278/anthropic-raises-3-5-billion-with-new-funding-round/
|
||||
[^10]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 2021, on the Series A led by Jaan Tallinn with James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems
|
||||
[^11]: "Anthropic reaches $61.5B valuation after latest funding round," Seeking Alpha, March 2025, on the 3.5-billion-dollar round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a 61.5-billion-dollar valuation. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4416449-anthropic-reaches-61_5b-valuation-after-latest-funding-round
|
||||
[^12]: "Anthropic raises $65 billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO," TechCrunch, May 28, 2026, on the 65-billion-dollar round at a 965-billion-dollar valuation co-led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1, the 47-billion-dollar revenue run rate, and the value surpassing OpenAI; and "Anthropic confidentially files for IPO after raising $65 billion," Fortune, June 1, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/anthropic-raises-65-billion-nears-1t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo/
|
||||
[^13]: "Amazon doubles down on Anthropic: $8B bet to power the future of AI," Tech Funding News, on Amazon's September 2023 commitment of up to 4 billion dollars and the additional 4 billion in November 2024 for 8 billion total through Amazon Web Services and Trainium. https://techfundingnews.com/amazon-anthropic-ai-investment-strategy/
|
||||
[^14]: "Google agrees to new $1 billion investment in Anthropic," CNBC, January 22, 2025, on Google's roughly 300 million dollars for about 10 percent in early 2023, the up-to-2-billion-dollar commitment, the further more-than-1-billion in January 2025, and the stake reported near 14 percent capped at 15 percent. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/google-agrees-to-new-1-billion-investment-in-anthropic.html
|
||||
[^15]: "Half of Google's and Amazon's 'blowout AI profits' came from a stake in Anthropic, not from their actual business," Fortune, April 30, 2026, on the unrealized gains from the Anthropic stakes and the cloud-payment arrangement. https://fortune.com/2026/04/30/google-amazon-ai-profits-anthropic-stake-bubble-earnings-2026/
|
||||
48
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Apollo Global Management.md
Normal file
48
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Apollo Global Management.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Apollo
|
||||
- PrivateEquity
|
||||
- LeonBlack
|
||||
- JeffreyEpstein
|
||||
- DrexelBurnham
|
||||
- Finance
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Apollo Advisors
|
||||
- Apollo Global Management Inc
|
||||
summary: "Private-equity and credit firm founded in 1990 by Leon Black and other Drexel Burnham Lambert alumni, whose co-founder's roughly 158 million dollars in payments to Jeffrey Epstein triggered an independent review, Black's 2021 resignation, and a Senate investigation."
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Apollo Global Management is an American alternative-asset management firm founded in 1990 and headquartered in [[New York]]. It was built by [[Leon Black]] and other alumni of the collapsed investment bank [[Drexel Burnham Lambert]] into one of the largest managers of private-equity, credit, and insurance assets in the world. The firm's co-founder and longtime leader, Black, resigned as chief executive and chairman in 2021 after the disclosure that he had paid [[Jeffrey Epstein]] about 158 million dollars for tax and estate advice, a relationship that prompted an independent board review, a U.S. Senate investigation, and, in 2026, shareholder suits alleging the firm concealed the extent of the ties.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding From Drexel
|
||||
|
||||
Apollo grew directly out of the 1990 bankruptcy of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm where Black had been head of mergers and acquisitions alongside the junk-bond financier [[Michael Milken]]. Black founded the firm, initially called Apollo Advisors, with the former Drexel executives [[Josh Harris]] and [[Marc Rowan]], and the early partnership drew in other Drexel veterans including [[Tony Ressler]], who later left to found [[Ares Management]]. The firm assembled a team experienced in high-yield debt at the moment the junk-bond market was distressed and many such securities could be bought cheaply.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
One of Apollo's formative transactions was its role in the acquisition of the junk-bond portfolio of the failed insurer [[Executive Life]], whose assets were taken over with financing from the French bank [[Credit Lyonnais]]. Federal authorities later alleged that Credit Lyonnais had illegally used front companies to acquire the insurer in violation of laws barring banks from owning insurers, and the matter produced one of the largest such settlements, in the mid-2000s. Apollo and Black profited substantially from the distressed portfolio, and the deal established the firm's early returns.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Growth, Credit, and Athene
|
||||
|
||||
Apollo expanded from distressed-debt investing into leveraged buyouts, corporate private equity, and a large credit business, growing to hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management. The firm listed on the [[New York Stock Exchange]] in 2011 under the ticker APO. Black served as chairman and chief executive throughout this period and became one of the wealthiest figures in American finance and a major art collector and museum patron.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
A central part of Apollo's later growth was its relationship with the annuities and retirement-services company [[Athene]], founded in 2009 and managed in close affiliation with Apollo, which supplied a large, permanent capital base for Apollo's credit strategies. Apollo and Athene completed an all-stock merger in 2022, folding the insurer fully into the firm and making retirement-services and insurance assets a core of the business. The combination gave Apollo one of the largest pools of insurance-linked investable capital among alternative managers.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Epstein Scandal and the Leadership Transition
|
||||
|
||||
Press and investor scrutiny of Black's financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein led Apollo's board to commission an independent review by the law firm [[Dechert]], released on January 25, 2021, which documented about 158 million dollars in payments from Black to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for tax and estate-planning work and reported no evidence that Black participated in Epstein's crimes. The board accepted the findings and announced governance changes and a leadership transition the same day, with Black to step down as chief executive and Marc Rowan to succeed him.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Black left more abruptly than planned, relinquishing the chairmanship as well on March 22, 2021, and Rowan became chief executive. Black publicly accused his co-founder Josh Harris of working to push him out, and the two men's feud played out in the financial press as Harris departed the firm. Rowan consolidated leadership and continued Apollo's expansion, while the Senate Finance Committee's investigation into Black's Epstein-linked tax planning, opened under Ranking Member [[Ron Wyden]], continued into 2026.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2026, after further Epstein file releases renewed attention to Black and Apollo, the firm faced securities-fraud class-action suits alleging that it had failed to disclose to shareholders the scope of Black's dealings with Epstein and the resulting risks. Apollo has said Black's relationship with Epstein was a personal matter unrelated to the firm's business, a characterization the plaintiffs dispute.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Apollo Announces Review of Significant Governance Enhancements as Part of Continued Evolution and Institutionalization of the Firm and Leadership Transition." *Apollo Global Management,* January 25, 2021. https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2021/01/apollo-announces-review-of-significant-governance-enhancements-as-part-of-continued-evolution-and-institutionalization-of-the-firm-and-leadership-transition-211534651
|
||||
[^2]: "Leon Black quits Apollo months earlier than expected following Jeffrey Epstein investment scandal." *CNBC,* March 22, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/apollo-ceo-leon-black-leaves-follows-jeffrey-epstein-investment-scandal.html
|
||||
[^3]: For Apollo's founding from Drexel Burnham Lambert, the Executive Life and Credit Lyonnais matter, the firm's growth and 2011 listing, and the Athene relationship and 2022 merger, see the contemporaneous business press and the firm's corporate filings.
|
||||
[^4]: "How Wall Street's Apollo got tangled up again in the Epstein files." *CNN Business,* February 21, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/21/business/apollo-epstein-wall-street
|
||||
[^5]: "Apollo, Leon Black sued for allegedly concealing Epstein business ties from shareholders." *Yahoo Finance / Reuters,* 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apollo-leon-black-sued-allegedly-004535212.html
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- BerkeleyExistentialRiskInitiative
|
||||
- ExistentialRisk
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- AISafety
|
||||
- JaanTallinn
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
|
||||
- BERI
|
||||
summary: "The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative is the nonprofit founded in 2017 by Andrew Critch that provides free operational support and grants to university research groups working on existential risk, funded chiefly by Jaan Tallinn and Open Philanthropy."
|
||||
location: "Berkeley, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) is an American nonprofit founded in 2017 that supports academic research groups studying risks to the long-term survival of humanity. Its distinctive method is to supply university centers with services and staff that universities are slow to provide, hiring contractors, engineers, and assistants and handling logistics on behalf of researchers, and it also makes grants to such groups. BERI is funded chiefly by the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]] and by [[Open Philanthropy]], and it has served as an operational and grantmaking intermediary in the existential-risk and AI-safety field, including for Tallinn's [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2017 Founding and the Free-Services Model
|
||||
|
||||
BERI was founded in 2017 by [[Andrew Critch]], a mathematician and AI-safety researcher then associated with the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the University of California, Berkeley, and it registered as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity based in Berkeley. The organization's premise is that university research centers working on existential risk are often hamstrung by the administrative limits of their host institutions, which are slow to hire support staff, buy equipment, or pay outside contractors, and that an external nonprofit can act as a force multiplier by providing those things quickly and flexibly. Since 2020 BERI has been run by its executive director Sawyer Bernath.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In practice BERI offers what it calls free services to the groups it collaborates with, paying for research assistants, software engineers, technical writers, translators, editors, event logistics, and computing resources, so that academic researchers can concentrate on their work rather than on procurement and administration. The model treats the bottleneck on existential-risk research as operational rather than purely intellectual, and BERI positions itself as the back-office and funding hub that removes that bottleneck for the centers it works with.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The University Collaborations
|
||||
|
||||
BERI's central activity is a set of collaborations with university research groups, the most prominent of which is the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at the University of California, Berkeley, the AI-safety laboratory led by the computer scientist [[Stuart Russell]]. Through these collaborations BERI hires and pays people who work alongside the academic centers without being on the university payroll, and it has at various times worked with groups including the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]] at Cambridge and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at Oxford.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The arrangement extends the reach of donors who want to support a university center but find that the university itself cannot easily absorb or spend the money. By channeling support through BERI, a funder can pay for the staff and services a center needs without navigating the institution's bureaucracy, an approach BERI has described as building trust-based relationships with a small number of research groups rather than making open grant competitions its main work.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding
|
||||
|
||||
BERI is funded by the same small set of donors that supports much of the existential-risk and AI-safety field. As of July 2022 the organization reported having received more than 7 million dollars from Jaan Tallinn, more than 3.3 million dollars from Open Philanthropy, more than 1.6 million dollars from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, 100,000 dollars from the [[FTX Future Fund]], and roughly 5 million dollars from other funders. Tallinn is its single largest backer.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
BERI announced its first grants program in September 2017, and its early grantmaking, funded by Tallinn, was one of the channels through which his existential-risk giving flowed before he formalized the Survival and Flourishing Fund and its S-process in 2019; BERI has continued to act as a grantmaking and fiscal intermediary that distributes some of the funds the S-process recommends. The concentration of its support among a handful of donors, principally Tallinn and Open Philanthropy, mirrors the funding structure of the wider field it serves.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Info," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the mission to improve civilization's long-term prospects, the collaboration-with-university-groups strategy, the free-services model, the 2017 founding by Andrew Critch, and the leadership of Sawyer Bernath since 2020. https://www.beri.org/
|
||||
[^2]: "Our Funding" and financial disclosures, Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the July 2022 totals of more than 7 million dollars from Jaan Tallinn, more than 3.3 million from Open Philanthropy, more than 1.6 million from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, 100,000 dollars from the FTX Future Fund, and about 5 million from other funders. https://www.beri.org/
|
||||
[^3]: "Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative," Effective Altruism Forum topic entry, on the 2017 founding by Andrew Critch, the operational-support model, and the work with university groups. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/berkeley-existential-risk-initiative
|
||||
[^4]: "Collaborations," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the partnership with the Center for Human-Compatible AI under Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley and other research groups. https://www.beri.org/collaborations
|
||||
[^5]: "March 2017: Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative," Effective Altruism Funds, on early grant support to BERI. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/payouts/march-2017-berkeley-existential-risk-initiative-beri
|
||||
[^6]: "Announcing BERI's first grants program," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, September 25, 2017, on the first grants program funded by Jaan Tallinn. https://existence.org/2017/09/25/announcing-beris-first-grants-program.html
|
||||
50
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Blockstream.md
Normal file
50
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Blockstream.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Blockstream
|
||||
- Bitcoin
|
||||
- Cryptocurrency
|
||||
- Sidechains
|
||||
- LightningNetwork
|
||||
- AdamBack
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Blockstream
|
||||
- Blockstream Corporation
|
||||
summary: "Blockstream is the Bitcoin-infrastructure company that Adam Back and others founded in 2014, builder of the Liquid sidechain and the Core Lightning implementation, employer of several Bitcoin Core developers, and a $3.2 billion firm after its 2021 Series B."
|
||||
location: "Victoria, British Columbia"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Blockstream is a blockchain technology company founded in 2014 to build infrastructure for [[Bitcoin]], cofounded by the cryptographer [[Adam Back]], who serves as its chief executive, along with the entrepreneur Austin Hill, the Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille, Erik Svenson, and others. The company originated the concept of pegged sidechains, develops the Liquid Network sidechain and the Core Lightning implementation of the Lightning Network, runs a Bitcoin mining business, and employs several of the developers who maintain the Bitcoin Core software. A 2021 Series B financing valued it at 3.2 billion dollars.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Sidechains Paper
|
||||
|
||||
Blockstream was incorporated in 2014, drawing together a group of established Bitcoin engineers and cryptographers, with Back as chief executive and Austin Hill among the founders. In October 2014 the founding team published the white paper "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains," whose authors were Back, Matt Corallo, Luke Dashjr, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Miller, Andrew Poelstra, Jorge Timón, and Pieter Wuille. The paper proposed letting bitcoins move between the main Bitcoin blockchain and separate chains through a two-way peg, so that new features could be tested and run on a sidechain while remaining denominated in bitcoin and pegged to the main ledger.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The premise was that experimental functions which Bitcoin's conservative development process would not adopt directly, such as confidential transaction amounts, faster settlement, or the issuance of other assets, could be deployed on a pegged sidechain that borrowed Bitcoin's currency without altering Bitcoin itself. The company raised a 21 million dollar seed round in 2014 and a 55 million dollar Series A in 2016, with investors including the venture firm Horizons Ventures and AXA Strategic Ventures.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Liquid, Core Lightning, and Other Products
|
||||
|
||||
Blockstream's principal sidechain product is the Liquid Network, which it launched in 2018 as a federation operated by exchanges, brokers, and trading desks. Liquid is a Bitcoin layer built on Blockstream's open-source Elements platform; it offers faster and final settlement than the main chain, confidential transactions that hide amounts and asset types, and the issuance of tokens including stablecoins, and it is secured by a federation of functionaries rather than by open proof-of-work mining. Blockstream initially launched Liquid with about two dozen institutional members.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The company also develops Core Lightning, formerly named c-lightning, one of the principal implementations of the Lightning Network, a system of off-chain payment channels that settles small Bitcoin transactions rapidly and cheaply before recording net results on the main chain. Its other products include Blockstream Satellite, which broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain from space so that nodes can stay synchronized without a conventional internet connection, the open-source Blockstream Jade hardware wallet, and an enterprise mining and hosting business that the company expanded after acquiring the ASIC maker Spondoolies.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding and Bitcoin Core Developers
|
||||
|
||||
In August 2021 Blockstream closed a 210 million dollar Series B financing that valued the company at 3.2 billion dollars, a round led by Baillie Gifford and iFinex, the operator of the Bitfinex exchange, with the proceeds directed at expanding the mining business and the Liquid Network. The Series B made the Victoria, British Columbia, company one of the more highly valued firms built specifically around Bitcoin infrastructure.[^8][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Blockstream has employed a number of the developers who write and maintain Bitcoin Core, the dominant implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, a fact that has drawn both credit for funding open-source work and criticism that a single private company exercises outsized influence over the protocol's direction. Cofounder Pieter Wuille, a longtime Bitcoin Core maintainer who led the Segregated Witness upgrade, worked at Blockstream before leaving for the payments company Chaincode Labs in 2023. The company's research division, Blockstream Research, has employed Andrew Poelstra, a coinventor of the Taproot upgrade, Bulletproofs, and Confidential Assets, and Russell O'Connor, author of the experimental blockchain programming language Simplicity.[^9][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Blockstream," *Bitcoin Wiki,* on the 2014 founding, Adam Back as chief executive, Austin Hill and the cofounders, the seed and Series A rounds, and the product line. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blockstream
|
||||
[^2]: "A Deep Look at the Company Blockstream and Their Bitcoin Technology," *Blockonomi,* on the founders, sidechains, Liquid, Lightning, the funding history, and the 3.2 billion dollar valuation. https://blockonomi.com/blockstream-bitcoin/
|
||||
[^3]: Back, Adam, et al. "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains," October 2014, the pegged-sidechains white paper and its author list. https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf
|
||||
[^4]: "Blockstream Releases Sidechain White Paper on Liquid and Strong Federations," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on the October 2014 sidechains paper and the two-way peg concept. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/blockstream-releases-sidechain-white-paper-liquid-and-strong-federations
|
||||
[^5]: "Liquid: A Bitcoin Sidechain," Blockstream, on the Liquid federation, confidential transactions, asset issuance, and the 2018 launch with institutional members. https://blockstream.com/assets/downloads/pdf/liquid-whitepaper.pdf
|
||||
[^6]: "About," Blockstream, on the 2014 founding, the founders, and the products Liquid Network, Core Lightning, Blockstream Satellite, Blockstream Jade, and Elements, and the research program. https://blockstream.com/about/
|
||||
[^7]: "Blockstream 2018 Review: Countdown to Ignition," Blockstream, on the launch of the Liquid Network and c-lightning and the mining and satellite products. https://blockstream.com/2019/01/03/en-blockstream-2018-review
|
||||
[^8]: "Blockstream Secures $210M Series B Financing," Blockstream, on the August 2021 round, the 3.2 billion dollar valuation, the lead investors Baillie Gifford and iFinex, and the mining and Liquid focus. https://blog.blockstream.com/en-blockstream-secures-210m-series-b-financing/
|
||||
[^9]: "The Focus of Blockstream Research," Blockstream, on the research division and its developers including Andrew Poelstra and Russell O'Connor, and on Pieter Wuille's Bitcoin Core maintainership. https://blog.blockstream.com/blockstream-research-the-focus/
|
||||
49
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/CCRU.md
Normal file
49
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/CCRU.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- CCRU
|
||||
- CyberneticCultureResearchUnit
|
||||
- NickLand
|
||||
- SadiePlant
|
||||
- MarkFisher
|
||||
- Accelerationism
|
||||
- Hyperstition
|
||||
- UniversityOfWarwick
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
|
||||
summary: "The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental research collective established at the University of Warwick philosophy department in the mid-1990s by Nick Land and Sadie Plant, whose members included Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun, and whose output blended philosophy, cybernetics, science fiction, and music theory to produce the accelerationist and hyperstitional frameworks that subsequently fed into the Dark Enlightenment."
|
||||
location: "University of Warwick, Coventry, England"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The [[CCRU|Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)]] was an experimental research collective established at the [[University of Warwick|University of Warwick]] philosophy department in the mid-1990s. The CCRU was co-founded by [[Nick Land|Nick Land]] and [[Sadie Plant|Sadie Plant]] and its core members included [[Mark Fisher|Mark Fisher]], [[Kodwo Eshun|Kodwo Eshun]], and [[Steve Goodman|Steve Goodman]] (who operated as the musician [[Kode9|Kode9]]). The CCRU's output blended philosophy, cybernetics, [[Afrofuturism|Afrofuturism]], science fiction, and music theory, and produced the [[Accelerationism|accelerationist]] and [[hyperstition|hyperstitional]] frameworks that subsequently fed into the [[Dark Enlightenment|Dark Enlightenment]] and [[Neoreaction|neoreaction]].[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Warwick Period and the Practice
|
||||
|
||||
The CCRU emerged from Land's Warwick orbit around 1995, outside the normal philosophy-departmental structure. Land, appointed to the Warwick philosophy department in the late 1980s after completing his doctorate at the [[University of Essex|University of Essex]] on [[Georges Bataille|Georges Bataille]], had built a cult following among philosophy students for his intensity and his departure from the conventional analytic-philosophy curriculum. The CCRU functioned as a research collective whose self-described practice was "conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources."[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The CCRU's output included academic papers, performative lectures, the [[Virtual Futures|Virtual Futures]] conferences, and a body of hyperstitional texts written as if the cybernetic fictions they described were real. The hyperstition practice is the CCRU's documented methodological innovation: the production of fictions that make themselves real through the act of propagation. The practice is the philosophical ancestor of the [[Chan ARG Ecosystem|chan-ARG hyperstitional tradition]] (including [[TheGame23|TheGame23]]) and of the broader internet-native narrative-production forms that descend from it.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Accelerationist Argument
|
||||
|
||||
Land's CCRU-era argument held that capitalism and technological change are not instruments to be steered by political will but forces that are themselves doing the steering. The argument drew on [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari]]'s concept of [[deterritorialization|deterritorialization]], on [[Bataille|Bataille]]'s accursed-share economics of excess, and on the cybernetic theory of [[Norbert Wiener|Norbert Wiener]] to produce the framing that techno-capitalism is an autonomous, self-optimizing process that will dissolve the existing order. The CCRU's accelerationism is the philosophical ancestor of both the left-accelerationism (which retains the political-steering element) and Land's subsequent right-accelerationism (which drops the steering and argues for pure acceleration of the autonomous process).[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Land set out the argument in the Warwick-era texts "Machinic Desire" (1993) and "Meltdown" (1994), the latter framing capitalism as drawn toward a "technocapital singularity" in which markets, intelligence, and machinery fuse into a single inhuman circuit of escalation, and asking "does anything human make it out of the near future?"[^4] These papers, long circulated in samizdat, were collected with the rest of Land's 1987-2007 output in *Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007* (Urbanomic/Sequence Press, March 2011), edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier.[^5] The CCRU lineage split along political lines in 2013, when Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek (students of Brassier, himself a Warwick contemporary of Fisher) published "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," which retained the demand to harness technological acceleration toward egalitarian ends, while Land, by then writing from Shanghai, pushed the opposite reading toward the antiegalitarian Dark Enlightenment he named in his 2012 essay of that title.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Aftermath and the Intellectual Lineage
|
||||
|
||||
Land left Warwick around 1998 amid a combination of intellectual exhaustion, amphetamine use, and mental-health crisis documented in Fisher's writing and the retrospective CCRU accounts. The CCRU dissolved, and its members dispersed. Land relocated to [[Shanghai|Shanghai]] and developed the Dark Enlightenment synthesis with [[Curtis Yarvin|Yarvin]]. Fisher published *[[Capitalist Realism|Capitalist Realism]]* (2009) and became an influential cultural theorist before his death in 2017. Eshun published *[[More Brilliant than the Sun|More Brilliant than the Sun]]* (1998) on Afrofuturism and sonic fiction. Goodman established the [[Hyperdub|Hyperdub]] record label.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Fisher began the k-punk blog in 2003 as a continuation of the CCRU's theory-fiction register, then turned it toward a left politics his 2012 essay "Terminator vs. Avatar" used to credit Land's diagnosis while rejecting his abandonment of "the human side"; Fisher took his own life on January 13, 2017.[^7] Land's later trajectory ran the CCRU vocabulary in the opposite direction: his neoreactionary writing was adopted by the American alt-right, and the hyperstition and accelerationist registers were recycled a third time in the "effective accelerationism" (e/acc) movement that circulated among [[Silicon Valley|Silicon Valley]] technologists from 2022 onward. The shared origin point means a single Warwick-era body of texts now feeds the left-accelerationist, neoreactionary, and e/acc currents simultaneously, each citing the same source material toward incompatible ends.[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: For the CCRU's founding, members, and Warwick period, see the retrospective accounts of CCRU members and the [[Monoskop|Monoskop]] archive.
|
||||
[^2]: For Land's CCRU-era accelerationism and the hyperstition practice, see the Nick Land page and the Chan ARG Ecosystem page for the hyperstition lineage.
|
||||
[^3]: "Forward? A Short History of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit." *Medium.* https://medium.com/@sam.mcilhagga/forward-a-short-history-of-the-cybernetic-culture-research-unit-cdbd4c18061a
|
||||
[^4]: "What is Nick Land's philosophy of accelerationism really?" *Aeon.* https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really . Land's "Meltdown" (1994) and "Machinic Desire" (1993) are collected in *Fanged Noumena* (see note 5).
|
||||
[^5]: Land, Nick. *Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007.* Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier. Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011. https://www.urbanomic.com/book/fanged-noumena/
|
||||
[^6]: Williams, Alex, and Nick Srnicek. "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," 2013; Land, Nick. "The Dark Enlightenment" (series), 2012 onward. For the left/right split and the e/acc revival, see "What is Accelerationism?" *Reality Studies.* https://www.realitystudies.co/p/what-is-accelerationism-effective-eacc-nick-land-mark-fisher
|
||||
[^7]: Fisher, Mark. *k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher,* ed. Darren Ambrose. Repeater Books, 2018; "Terminator vs Avatar" (2012). For Fisher's death, see the *Los Angeles Review of Books* essay on the *k-punk* collection. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-necessity-of-being-judgmental-on-k-punk-the-collected-and-unpublished-writings-of-mark-fisher/
|
||||
51
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Carbyne.md
Normal file
51
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Carbyne.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Carbyne
|
||||
- Reporty
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
- EhudBarak
|
||||
- JeffreyEpstein
|
||||
- Israel
|
||||
- FoundersFund
|
||||
- EmergencyTech
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Carbyne
|
||||
- Reporty Homeland Security
|
||||
summary: "Carbyne is an Israeli-American emergency-communication and surveillance technology company founded in Tel Aviv as Reporty Homeland Security, into which Jeffrey Epstein quietly invested approximately one million dollars in 2015 through an arrangement brokered by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and which has also received backing from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and has been deployed by U.S. police departments including Miami-Dade."
|
||||
location: "Tel Aviv, Israel; New York, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Carbyne (originally incorporated as [[Reporty|Reporty Homeland Security]]) is an Israeli-American technology company that develops cloud-native emergency-communication and 911-response platforms providing real-time video, location, and data transmission from callers to emergency dispatchers. [[Forbes|Forbes]] reported in February 2026 that [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]] quietly invested approximately one million dollars in Reporty in 2015 through an arrangement brokered by [[Ehud Barak|former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak]], after Epstein was already a registered sex offender. Carbyne has also received backing from [[Founders Fund]], the [[Peter Thiel|Peter Thiel]] venture firm, and has been deployed by U.S. police departments including the [[Miami-Dade Police Department|Miami-Dade Police Department]].[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Epstein-Barak Investment Arrangement (2015)
|
||||
|
||||
Forbes reported in February 2026 (Thomas Brewster) that Barak helped Epstein invest approximately one million dollars in Reporty in 2015, an investment that could have grown to be worth up to one hundred million dollars. The arrangement was made after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement and his subsequent [[Florida|Florida]] sex-offender registration. Barak was a key figure in the company and channeled Epstein's money into the startup. The [[Miami Herald|Miami Herald]] reported separately that Epstein secretly funded the startup subsequently used by the Miami-Dade Police Department.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Through the Barak-Epstein-Carbyne arrangement, Epstein moved from social-network brokerage to direct commercial investment in surveillance-adjacent technology. Barak was the channel through which the investment was arranged. The company's emergency-response product integrates smartphone location, live video, and incident data into a centralized dispatcher view, and the same architecture supports population-level monitoring.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Founders Fund Backing
|
||||
|
||||
Founders Fund is a documented backer of Carbyne, placing the company in the Thiel venture portfolio alongside [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]], [[Anduril Industries|Anduril]], and [[Clearview AI|Clearview]]. The Founders Fund backing and the Epstein-Barak investment ran alongside each other, meaning the company simultaneously held Epstein investment (brokered by the former Israeli prime minister Barak) and Thiel-network venture backing.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Carbyne has been deployed in U.S. emergency-response systems including [[New Orleans|New Orleans]], where the platform was integrated into the city's 911 dispatch infrastructure. The Miami-Dade Police Department used the product that Epstein's money had funded, per the Miami Herald reporting on the Epstein-Carbyne investment chain. The documented deployment of an Epstein-funded product by a U.S. law-enforcement agency is the concrete operational outcome of the investment arrangement.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The simultaneous Epstein-Barak and Founders Fund backing of a single Israeli surveillance-tech startup connects three networks through one company: the Epstein-Barak Israeli-intelligence channel, the Thiel commercial network, and the Israeli surveillance-technology export sector (documented on the [[NSO Group|NSO Group]] and Barak pages). Carbyne is the node where all three converge in a single corporate entity.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Israeli Surveillance-Technology Export Context
|
||||
|
||||
[[Jacobin|Jacobin]] reported in July 2023 that [[Israel|Israel]]'s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories has functioned as a "laboratory" for surveillance and security technology, giving Israeli firms specialized know-how in monitoring civilian populations. The Carbyne/Reporty emergency-response platform sits within this broader Israeli surveillance-technology export sector, and the [[Reason|Reason]] reporting on Epstein's spy-industry connections (August 2025) documented that Epstein and Barak marketed Israeli surveillance technology internationally, including to [[Nigeria|Nigeria]], with technology reportedly tested on Palestinian populations.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Black Agenda Report|Black Agenda Report]] documented a parallel pipeline in which Israel's Gaza-tested biometric and surveillance scanners were routed into a Nigerian ports deal through [[United Arab Emirates|UAE]] channels. Nigeria is documented as [[Africa|Africa]]'s largest customer of surveillance-technology contracts, spending at least 470 million dollars on AI-powered surveillance devices. The Israeli surveillance-technology export sector, of which Carbyne is a part, operates across the documented chain from Palestinian-population testing through international marketing to deployment in authoritarian and democratic states alike.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Brewster, Thomas. "Epstein Could Have Made $100 Million On A Secret Police Tech Investment With Ehud Barak." *Forbes,* February 10, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/02/10/epstein-police-surveillance-investments-with-ehud-barak/
|
||||
[^2]: "Epstein secretly funded start-up used by Miami-Dade police." *Miami Herald,* 2020.
|
||||
[^3]: "Founders Fund Invests in a 911 Startup Backed by Ehud Barak." *CTech (Calcalist),* documenting Peter Thiel's Founders Fund joining a Series B round in Carbyne/Reporty, the firm's first Israeli investment. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3744302,00.html
|
||||
[^4]: "Inside Jeffrey Epstein's spy industry connections." *Reason,* August 27, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/08/27/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-spy-industry-connections/
|
||||
[^5]: "Israel Has Turned the Occupied Territories Into a Laboratory for Surveillance." *Jacobin,* July 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/07/israel-occupation-surveillance-security-state-technology-export
|
||||
[^6]: "Epstein Flipped Israel's Gaza-Tested Biometric Scanners Into Nigeria Ports Deal." *Black Agenda Report.* For the Nigeria surveillance-technology spending, see the IDS Sussex and Punch Nigeria reporting.
|
||||
40
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Center for Applied Rationality.md
Normal file
40
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Center for Applied Rationality.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- CFAR
|
||||
- Rationalism
|
||||
- MIRI
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- CFAR
|
||||
summary: "The Center for Applied Rationality is a Berkeley nonprofit spun off from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2012 to teach rationality techniques through residential workshops, which served as a recruitment funnel for AI-safety work and whose 2019 alumni reunion was protested by the group that became the Zizians."
|
||||
location: "Berkeley, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a nonprofit founded in 2012 in [[Berkeley]], [[California]], as a spin-off of the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI), created to teach the reasoning techniques developed in the [[Rationalist Community]] through paid residential workshops. Its founders came from the MIRI orbit and included [[Anna Salamon]] and [[Julia Galef]]. CFAR shared personnel, premises, and an [[Effective Altruism]] donor base with MIRI, and its workshops functioned as a recruitment funnel that drew talented young people toward artificial-intelligence-safety work and the broader rationalist milieu.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Workshops and the AI-Safety Funnel
|
||||
|
||||
CFAR ran multi-day workshops teaching "applied rationality," a curriculum of decision-making, debiasing, and emotional-processing techniques. The founding instructor group, beyond Salamon and Galef, included [[Valentine Smith]] and the AI-safety researcher [[Andrew Critch]], and the organization began offering classes in 2012. A standard residential workshop ran four and a half days at a fee of 3,900 dollars, with scholarships and a free preliminary consultation; Galef served as president until 2016, when Salamon, who had come from MIRI, succeeded her. CFAR and MIRI shared offices in Berkeley.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The organization openly oriented its later programming toward AI-risk recruitment, holding specialized workshops, including dedicated "AI Risk for Computer Scientists" sessions run jointly with MIRI, to identify and route promising participants toward existential-risk work. The workshops, the group houses, and the annual alumni reunions formed the in-person spine of the Bay Area rationalist community during the 2010s. The curriculum borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy, debiasing research, and the community's own techniques such as "double crux" and "internal double crux," and the residential format placed instructors and participants in extended close contact that several later first-person accounts identified as a vector for the high-control dynamics that developed in the milieu.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Zizian Protest and the Abuse Accounts
|
||||
|
||||
In November 2019 the group around [[Jack LaSota]] that became the [[The Zizians|Zizians]] protested a CFAR alumni reunion in [[Sonoma County]], appearing in masks and robes, blocking the entrances, and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four protesters were arrested.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2021 a first-person account titled "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR" circulated on [[LessWrong]] alongside [[Zoe Curzi]]'s parallel writeup of [[Leverage Research]], describing psychological harm, high-control dynamics, and breakdowns in the MIRI and CFAR environment. A 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation gathered further accounts of abuse and coercion across the rationalist organizations. CFAR wound down its regular public workshop schedule around the start of the 2020s.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Center for Applied Rationality, founding 2012 as a spin-off of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; cross-referenced against the MIRI organizational timeline at timelines.issarice.com.
|
||||
[^2]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer, and the rationalist community record on CFAR workshops and the AI-safety recruitment orientation; see *Rationality: From AI to Zombies.* Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015.
|
||||
[^3]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/
|
||||
[^4]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
|
||||
[^5]: "Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News," on the 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation; discussion archived on the EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg
|
||||
[^6]: "The 'Rationality' Workshop That Teaches People to Think More Like Computers," *Vice,* on the CFAR curriculum, the founders Salamon, Galef, Smith, and Critch, the 3,900 dollar fee, and the residential format. https://www.vice.com/en/article/center-for-applied-rationality/
|
||||
[^7]: Critch, Andrew, "The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)," acritch.com, on the founding group, the shared Berkeley offices with MIRI, and the Galef-to-Salamon presidential succession in 2016. https://acritch.com/cfar/
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- CentreForTheStudyOfExistentialRisk
|
||||
- ExistentialRisk
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- JaanTallinn
|
||||
- CambridgeUniversity
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- CSER
|
||||
summary: "The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is a Cambridge University research center founded in 2012 by the philosopher Huw Price, the cosmologist Martin Rees, and the Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn to study catastrophic risks from advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and environmental collapse."
|
||||
location: "Cambridge, England"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is a research center within [[Cambridge University]] founded in 2012 to study risks that could threaten the survival of humanity, with a focus on those arising from advanced technology. It was established by the philosopher [[Huw Price]], the cosmologist [[Martin Rees]], and the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]], and it became one of the first academic homes for the study of [[Artificial Intelligence|AI]], biotechnology, and ecological risk, sharing personnel and concerns with the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermist]] networks and with sister institutions such as the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at the [[University of Oxford]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and Funding
|
||||
|
||||
The center traces its origin to a 2011 conversation in a Copenhagen taxi, where Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, shared a ride with Tallinn on the way to a conference dinner and the two found common ground on the dangers of advanced AI. Price recruited Rees, the [[Astronomer Royal]] and a former president of the [[Royal Society]], and the three announced the center in 2012; Tallinn supplied the seed funding that paid for its establishment and early activities. The astrophysicist and policy researcher [[Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh]] served as founding executive director, building the center from concept to a staffed research group between 2013 and 2015 and leading its major projects through 2020.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Beyond Tallinn's private donation, CSER's research drew institutional support including funding from the [[Templeton World Charity Foundation]], which backed its "Managing Extreme Technological Risk" project. The center was housed administratively within the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge, giving an academic base to a field that had largely existed outside universities. Its founders assembled a scientific advisory board that included the physicist [[Stephen Hawking]], the AI researcher [[Stuart Russell]], the Harvard geneticist [[George Church]], the global-health figure [[Peter Piot]], and the entrepreneur [[Elon Musk]].[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Research and the Leverhulme Spin-Off
|
||||
|
||||
CSER organizes its work around several families of catastrophic risk: risks from artificial intelligence and machine superintelligence, risks from biotechnology and engineered pandemics, environmental and ecological risk including climate change, and the broader study of how extreme technological risks should be governed. Its researchers produce academic papers, policy reports, and workshops, and the center has positioned itself as a bridge between the technical AI-safety community and mainstream science and policy institutions, in contrast to the more activist [[Future of Life Institute]] that Tallinn cofounded in 2014.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2016 CSER launched its first spin-off, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), a Cambridge-based center funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Price that concentrates on the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence over the long term. The two centers operate in close collaboration, with overlapping staff and research agendas, and together they made Cambridge one of the principal academic hubs for the study of AI risk in the United Kingdom. CSER has continued to publish on AI governance, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk under successive directors following Ó hÉigeartaigh's tenure.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "About Us," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, on the 2012 founding by Huw Price, Martin Rees, and Jaan Tallinn and the center's mission. https://www.cser.ac.uk/about-us/
|
||||
[^2]: "Could science destroy the world? These scholars want to save us from a modern-day Frankenstein," Science / AAAS, on the founders, the research areas of AI, biotech, and climate, the advisory board including Hawking, Russell, Church, Piot, and Musk, and Tallinn's funding. https://www.science.org/content/article/could-science-destroy-world-these-scholars-want-save-us-modern-day-frankenstein
|
||||
[^3]: "Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, on the 2011 Copenhagen taxi meeting between Price and Tallinn, Tallinn's seed funding, and Ó hÉigeartaigh's role as founding executive director from 2013 to 2015. https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/sean-o-heigeartaigh/
|
||||
[^4]: "Managing Extreme Technological Risk with the University of Cambridge," Templeton World Charity Foundation, on its funding of CSER's Managing Extreme Technological Risk project. https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/blog/managing-extreme-technological-risk-university-cambridge-video
|
||||
[^5]: "CSER: Playing with Technological Dominoes," Future of Life Institute, on CSER's research themes across AI, biotechnology, and environmental risk. https://futureoflife.org/biotech/playing-with-technological-dominoes/
|
||||
[^6]: "Huw Price," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, on the 2016 launch of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence as CSER's first spin-off, led by Price. https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/huw-price-2/
|
||||
59
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Clearview AI.md
Normal file
59
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Clearview AI.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- ClearviewAI
|
||||
- FacialRecognition
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- CharlesJohnson
|
||||
- HoanTonThat
|
||||
- FTC
|
||||
- LawEnforcement
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Clearview AI Inc.
|
||||
summary: "Clearview AI is a facial-recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, first funded by Peter Thiel before the company was even named, that scraped an estimated thirty billion images from social media and the open web to build a facial-identification database sold to law enforcement, and was the subject of a March 2022 FTC consent order barring it from selling the database to private entities."
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Clearview AI is an American facial-recognition company founded by [[Hoan Ton-That|Hoan Ton-That]] and [[Richard Schwartz|Richard Schwartz]] that built its database by scraping an estimated thirty billion images from social-media platforms and the open web, and sold facial-identification searches to law-enforcement agencies, government clients, and, in its early period, private actors. The [[Federal Trade Commission]] issued a consent order in March 2022 barring Clearview from selling or giving away access to its database to private entities and requiring deletion of data collected from consumers, settling allegations that the company violated consumer-privacy law. [[Peter Thiel]] was the company's first investor, providing seed funding before Clearview was even named (when it operated under the name [[Smart Checker|Smart Checker]]), and the conservative provocateur [[Charles C. Johnson|Charles Johnson]] played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Thiel Seed Investment
|
||||
|
||||
Hoan Ton-That, an Australian-born software developer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and political operative, founded Clearview AI in 2016-2017. The *New York Times* reported in March 2021 that Peter Thiel provided the seed funding for the company before it was even called Clearview AI, when it operated under the name Smart Checker. NPR confirmed in 2023 that Thiel was Clearview's first investor. Clearview was funded directly by Thiel rather than through [[Founders Fund]].[^1][^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The company's product is a facial-recognition search engine. A user uploads a photograph of a face, and the software searches the scraped-image database to return matching images and their source URLs. The database was built by automated scraping of public-facing images across social-media platforms ([[Facebook]], [[Instagram]], [[Twitter]], [[LinkedIn]], [[YouTube]], and others) and the open web. The platforms' terms of service prohibited the scraping; Clearview conducted it anyway. By 2020 the database was reported to contain over three billion images; by 2023, over thirty billion.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Charles Johnson and the Hidden Cofounder Role
|
||||
|
||||
Charles Johnson, described by the *New York Times* as a "notorious conservative provocateur," played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel in the company's formation. Johnson was a far-right media figure known for promoting debunked conspiracy theories (including the false claim that President [[Barack Obama|Obama]]'s National Security Advisor [[Susan Rice|Susan Rice]] had directed surveillance of the Trump campaign) and for his 2017 announcement that he was "building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads."[^1][^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson subsequently claimed to be a Clearview cofounder and sued the company for a share of its profits before dropping the suit in February 2025. The *Semafor* reporting (October 2024) documented a separate lawsuit alleging Johnson was "running a fraud and extortion scheme" and falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent. Johnson had also indicated he was a federal informant, as reported through the federal lawsuit against Clearview. The Johnson-Thiel relationship extends beyond Clearview: Johnson disclosed to the FBI that Thiel himself was an FBI informant, per the [[Business Insider]] reporting of October 2023, which documented Thiel's status as a confidential human source for the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]].[^5][^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The FTC Consent Order and the Regulatory Record
|
||||
|
||||
The FTC issued its consent order against Clearview in March 2022. The order barred Clearview from selling or giving away access to its facial-recognition database to any private entity and required the deletion of images and data collected from consumers, settling allegations that the company's practices violated consumer-privacy law. The FTC found that Clearview had collected facial images without consent, had marketed the product to private entities (including a reported outreach to a [[Macy's|Macy's]] executive and the use of the product by a [[Kohl's|Kohl's]] loss-prevention team), and had failed to implement adequate privacy safeguards.[^3][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The Illinois [[Biometric Information Privacy Act|Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)]] produced a separate settlement in May 2022, in which Clearview agreed to restrict its use of collected face images in Illinois and to honor an opt-out mechanism for residents. The company withdrew from the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada after regulatory action in each jurisdiction. The combined regulatory record left Clearview's law-enforcement and government business intact while constraining its commercial and international operations.[^8][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Law-Enforcement and Government Use
|
||||
|
||||
Clearview's documented law-enforcement client base includes over a million searches conducted as of March 2023, per the Consumer Watchdog report. The company's product has been used by municipal police departments, federal agencies, and international law-enforcement bodies. The *BuzzFeed News* investigation documented that Clearview's secret early users included a former Trump staffer, conservative think tanks, and a range of private actors beyond the law-enforcement client base the company publicly acknowledged.[^3][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement|ICE]] and the [[Department of Homeland Security|DHS]] are among the documented federal clients. The Clearview product supplies the same identity-resolution-from-public-data function that Palantir's Gotham platform supplies from classified and government-held data, and the two firms' products operate in adjacent segments of the federal surveillance infrastructure. [[Senator Ed Markey|Senator Ed Markey]] wrote to Ton-That in November 2023 raising civil-liberties concerns about the Clearview system's use, and the senator's letter is part of the public congressional record.[^3][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "What We Learned About Clearview AI's Hidden 'Co-Founder.'" *New York Times,* March 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/technology/clearview-facial-recognition-ai.html
|
||||
[^2]: "Exposing the Secretive Company at the Forefront of Facial Recognition Technology." *NPR,* September 28, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology
|
||||
[^3]: Consumer Watchdog. "Clearview AI" report, December 2023. https://consumerwatchdog.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Clearview-AI-Cover-Letter-and-Report.pdf
|
||||
[^4]: For the Thiel seed investment predating the Clearview name (the Smart Checker period), see the *New York Times* and NPR reporting cited above.
|
||||
[^5]: "Business Partner Sues Chuck Johnson for Falsely Presenting as Intelligence Agent." *Semafor,* October 16, 2024. https://www.semafor.com/article/10/16/2024/business-partner-sues-chuck-johnson-for-falsely-presenting-as-intelligence-agent
|
||||
[^6]: "Legal battle over Clearview AI's origin takes a turn as accuser drops suit." *Biometric Update,* February 2025. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202502/legal-battle-over-clearview-ais-origin-takes-a-turn-as-accuser-drops-suit
|
||||
[^7]: "Exclusive: Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Was an FBI Informant." *Business Insider,* October 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10
|
||||
[^8]: "Face-Scanner Clearview Agrees to Limits in Court Settlement." *WTTW,* May 10, 2022. https://news.wttw.com/2022/05/10/face-scanner-clearview-agrees-limits-court-settlement
|
||||
[^9]: For the FTC March 2022 consent order, see the Federal Trade Commission's published order and decision.
|
||||
[^10]: "Clearview AI's Secret Users Included A Former Trump Staffer, A Troll, And Conservative Think Tanks." *BuzzFeed News.* https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-trump-investors-friend-facial-recognition
|
||||
[^11]: Senator Ed Markey. Letter to Hoan Ton-That, November 2023. https://www.markey.senate.gov/download/senator-markey-letter-to-clearview-ai_-112023pdf
|
||||
50
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Deutsche Bank.md
Normal file
50
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Deutsche Bank.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- JeffreyEpstein
|
||||
- DeutscheBank
|
||||
- Banking
|
||||
- MoneyLaundering
|
||||
- SexTrafficking
|
||||
- ComplianceFailure
|
||||
- ButterflyTrust
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Deutsche Bank AG
|
||||
- Deutsche Bank Trust Company of the Americas
|
||||
summary: "German global bank that took Jeffrey Epstein as a client in 2013 after JPMorgan dropped him, processed suspicious payments to women and alleged co-conspirators despite internal warnings, and paid a 150 million dollar New York regulatory penalty and 75 million dollars to his victims."
|
||||
location: "Frankfurt, Germany"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Deutsche Bank AG is a global financial institution headquartered in [[Frankfurt]], Germany, which operates a New York branch and a trust company, Deutsche Bank Trust Company of the Americas, licensed by the [[New York Department of Financial Services]]. The bank maintained a relationship with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] and his related entities from August 2013 until December 2018, taking him on after [[JPMorgan Chase]] dropped him and ending the relationship after renewed press attention to his 2008 plea deal. In July 2020 the New York Department of Financial Services imposed a 150 million dollar penalty for compliance failures centered on the Epstein relationship, and in 2023 the bank agreed to pay 75 million dollars to settle a lawsuit by his victims.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Onboarding Epstein in 2013
|
||||
|
||||
In early 2013 Epstein began moving his assets to Deutsche Bank, brought in by a relationship manager who had previously serviced his accounts at a competitor bank and had joined Deutsche Bank's private wealth department in November 2012.[^1] The relationship manager told senior management that Epstein could generate millions of dollars in revenue and leads for other clients, with one internal email estimating flows of 100 to 300 million dollars over time and revenue of 2 to 4 million dollars annually.[^1] A May 5, 2013 "approval email" from a senior executive reported that the head of anti-money-laundering compliance and the general counsel for the Americas did not think the relationship required reputational-risk review, and the bank's Americas Reputational Risk Committee did not meet on the initial onboarding.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The relationship officially began on August 19, 2013, when Deutsche Bank opened brokerage accounts for Southern Trust Company Inc. and Southern Financial LLC, Epstein entities founded in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]].[^1] Over the course of the relationship, Epstein, his entities, and his associates opened and funded more than 40 accounts at the bank.[^1] The bank classified Epstein as "high-risk" and informally designated him an "Honorary PEP," or politically exposed person, because of his connections to prominent political figures.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The relationship had been publicly preceded by allegations against Epstein dating to 2005 and by his 2008 guilty plea to a state prostitution charge, after which press reports identified several alleged co-conspirators and described a modeling operation that brought young women, often from Eastern Europe, to the United States.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Suspicious Transactions and Overridden Warnings
|
||||
|
||||
As early as November 1, 2013, Epstein and his representatives used Deutsche Bank accounts to send wires to people who had been alleged to be co-conspirators in his past offenses, including at least 18 wires of 10,000 dollars or more to alleged co-conspirators identified in the consent order as Co-Conspirators 1, 2, and 3.[^1] On January 24, 2014 the bank opened accounts for an Epstein trust named "The Butterfly Trust," whose beneficiaries included those alleged co-conspirators and a number of women with Eastern European surnames; Epstein described the beneficiaries to bank personnel as employees or friends.[^1] Epstein used the Butterfly Trust and other accounts to send more than 120 wires totaling 2.65 million dollars to beneficiaries, for stated purposes such as hotel expenses, tuition, and rent, and made settlement payments to law firms exceeding 7 million dollars and additional legal-expense payments exceeding 6 million dollars.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Epstein's personal attorney made a total of 97 cash withdrawals from the bank's Park Avenue branch from 2013 to 2017, typically two to three times a month and each in the amount of 7,500 dollars, the bank's limit for third-party withdrawals, withdrawing in total more than 800,000 dollars on Epstein's behalf.[^1] In May 2014 the attorney asked the bank how often cash could be withdrawn without triggering an alert, and in July 2017 he broke a withdrawal exceeding 10,000 dollars over two days; bank personnel found him credible and let him continue.[^1] In a March 2017 exchange, a member of the transaction-monitoring team responded to an alert about payments to a Russian model and a Russian publicity agent by writing that "since this type of activity is normal for this client it is not deemed suspicious."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
When the Americas Reputational Risk Committee considered the Epstein relationship at meetings in January 2015, it kept the relationship while imposing conditions, but those conditions were never communicated to all members of the Epstein relationship team or to the transaction-monitoring team, and a compliance officer narrowed the monitoring standard so that little changed.[^1] The consent order found the bank's fundamental failure was that, although it properly classified Epstein as high-risk, it did little to scrutinize, inquire into, or block payments to named co-conspirators and to or on behalf of young women, or to ask why Epstein used on average more than 200,000 dollars per year in cash.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The DFS Penalty and Victim Settlement
|
||||
|
||||
The New York Department of Financial Services issued its consent order on July 6, 2020, finding that Deutsche Bank conducted business in an unsafe and unsound manner in violation of New York Banking Law section 44 and failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program in violation of 3 NYCRR section 116.2.[^1] The order, brought under sections 39 and 44 of the Banking Law, also addressed the bank's correspondent relationships with [[FBME Bank]] and [[Danske Bank]] Estonia, through which it cleared more than 267 billion dollars in transactions and identified hundreds of suspicious transactions.[^1] The order required Deutsche Bank to pay a penalty of 150 million dollars and credited the bank's cooperation and remediation.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The bank terminated the Epstein relationship after the [[Miami Herald]] published its November 2018 reporting on his 2008 plea deal, informing Epstein by letter on December 21, 2018 that it would no longer service his accounts.[^1] After the bank decided to offboard the accounts, a relationship manager nonetheless drafted reference letters to two other financial institutions stating that he was "unaware of any problems relating to the operation or use" of the accounts.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
In May 2023 Deutsche Bank agreed to pay 75 million dollars to settle a federal lawsuit in [[New York]] brought by a survivor identified as Jane Doe, who sought class-action status on behalf of other victims and alleged that the bank knowingly benefited from Epstein's sex trafficking and chose profit over compliance with the law.[^2] The plaintiffs were represented by [[Edwards Pottinger]] and [[Boies Schiller Flexner]], and one firm characterized the deal as among the largest sex-trafficking settlements with a bank in U.S. history; a federal judge approved it in October 2023.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
[^1]: New York State Department of Financial Services, In the Matter of Deutsche Bank AG, Deutsche Bank AG New York Branch, and Deutsche Bank Trust Company of the Americas, Consent Order Under New York Banking Law sections 39 and 44 (July 6, 2020). https://www.dfs.ny.gov/industry_guidance/enforcement_discipline/ea20200706_deutsche_bank
|
||||
[^2]: "Deutsche Bank to pay $75 million to Epstein victims in groundbreaking settlement, lawyers say," *PBS NewsHour / Associated Press,* 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/deutsche-bank-to-pay-75-million-to-epstein-victims-in-groundbreaking-settlement-lawyers-say
|
||||
[^3]: "US judge approves Deutsche Bank $75 million settlement with Epstein accusers," *CNN Business,* 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/business/deutsche-bank-settlement-epstein-accusers
|
||||
67
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Dialog.md
Normal file
67
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Dialog.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- SecretSociety
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- SiliconValley
|
||||
- Elites
|
||||
- Bilderberg
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Dialog Society
|
||||
- Dialog (organization)
|
||||
summary: "Dialog is an invitation-only secret society cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats, and whose 2026 retreat roster of 222 registrants was leaked to WIRED in June 2026 by the hacktivist maia arson crimew."
|
||||
location: "United States (founded); rotating annual retreat sites; planned Washington, D.C.-area campus"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Dialog is an invitation-only network cofounded in 2006 by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]] that convenes U.S. government officials, foreign government figures, and [[Silicon Valley]] executives at off-the-record annual retreats. The organization operated with no public website and a deliberately concealed membership for roughly two decades, drawing comparisons to the [[Bilderberg Group]] and the [[World Economic Forum]] as a transnational elite-gathering institution. In June 2026 a trove of internal records, including the registration list for the 2026 retreat (222 names), was published by the Swiss hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] and separately provided to *WIRED*, which named members including [[Elon Musk]], [[Sam Harris]], [[Jim Himes|Representative Jim Himes]], [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]], [[Ted Cruz|Senator Ted Cruz]], [[Jared Polis|Governor Jared Polis]], [[Jonathan Levin]] (president of [[Stanford University]]), and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe [[Alexus Grynkewich|General Alexus Grynkewich]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The leak exposed the intersection of three networks that are otherwise studied separately: the [[PayPal Mafia]] commercial clique around Thiel, the federal-contracting and intelligence community served by [[Palantir Technologies]], and the consumer-data-brokerage industry built by Hoffman through [[SafeGraph]] and [[LiveRamp]]. Dialog convenes principals from all three networks in a single off-the-record setting, and the 2026 registration list is the first primary record of its attendees.
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and Format
|
||||
|
||||
Dialog was founded in 2006 by Thiel and Hoffman. Thiel is the cofounder and chairman of Palantir Technologies and the central figure of the PayPal Mafia; Hoffman is the founder of the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp. The two structured Dialog as a recurring in-person retreat rather than a conventional industry conference: registrants pay a fee, reported by statistician [[Andrew Gelman]] on his [[Columbia University]] blog *Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science* in April 2022 as exceeding 16,000 U.S. dollars, for access to multi-day gatherings whose proceedings are conducted under off-the-record rules. The fee and the closed-door format distinguish Dialog from industry conferences, which trade attendance for sponsorship and press access.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The retreat format mixes panels, small-group discussions, and informal socializing. *WIRED* reported that the 2026 retreat agenda, scheduled for August 12 through 16 at a site near [[Dublin]], included sessions on artificial intelligence disruption, cult-building, sexuality, and preparation for [[World War III]]. The cult-building session sits within a recurring Thiel-network treatment of cult dynamics that runs from his book *[[Zero to One]]*, which describes the best startups as "slightly less extreme kinds of cults," through the [[Hereticon]] conference and the [[Rationalist Community]] he funded from 2005.[^1][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
An associated mobile application offers matchmaking functionality among members, routing introductions between registrants. The app extends the in-person retreat into a persistent member network between gatherings, operating as a fee-gated private club with off-the-record rules rather than as an open conference.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Membership and the 2026 Leak
|
||||
|
||||
Dialog maintained its membership list as confidential from founding through 2026. Two separate disclosures broke that posture in June 2026. The hacktivist crimew located a membership directory embedded in the source code of the Dialog website, reflecting the site's access controls, and published a subset of the names. Separately, a source provided *WIRED* with the complete registration list for the 2026 retreat, naming 222 registrants. The two leaks are distinct in mechanism and scope: the website-source disclosure exposed the access-controlled directory, while the registration list exposed a single year's confirmed attendees.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The confirmed 2026 registrants, as reported by *WIRED*, spanned U.S. partisan politics, the technology industry, finance, media, and the military. Beyond the headline figures, the list included [[Chamath Palihapitiya]] (founder of Social Capital), [[Neal Mohan]] (chief executive of YouTube), [[Peter Attia]] (physician and author of *Outlive*), [[Scott Belsky]] (partner at A24, former chief strategy officer and chief product officer at Adobe), and six members of the PayPal Mafia. *WIRED* additionally identified "sitting [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration officials" and "a former Middle East chief" among the registrants without naming them in the published text.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
*WIRED* and [[Gizmodo]] drew the explicit Bilderberg comparison on the basis of the roster's breadth: sitting U.S. senators of both parties, an active four-star military commander, sitting technology executives, and venture capital figures. Unlike Bilderberg, Dialog is a privately held U.S. entity with no disclosure obligations, no published attendee list, and no press access. Himes (the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee) and Grynkewich (the NATO SACEUR) appear on the same off-the-record roster as the executives whose firms contract to the agencies Himes oversees and Grynkewich commands.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Prior Outings: The 2013 Invite and the Gelman Post
|
||||
|
||||
Dialog's secrecy was breached twice before the 2026 leak, without producing a comprehensive membership disclosure. In April 2022 the statistician Gelman published a Dialog invitation to his Columbia University blog, describing the registration fee and format; this is the source of the published fee figure of more than 16,000 dollars. Gelman's post was a limited disclosure, naming the event and its cost but not the attendees.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Earlier, a 2013 Dialog retreat invitation surfaced in the U.S. Department of Justice document release from the [[Jeffrey Epstein]] files. The invitation had been forwarded to Epstein in November 2012, placing him on the circulation list for a Dialog event, and listed roughly 130 past participants as social proof of the gathering's prestige. The document (indexed as D-23831 in the [[Epstein Files|Epstein document release]]) established that Dialog's historical invitee network overlapped with the Epstein contact network at least a year after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement. Thiel separately met with Epstein in 2014, according to records reviewed by the *New York Times*, and the 2013 invite shows the channel ran through Dialog's own circulation list.[^1][^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The D.C. Campus
|
||||
|
||||
In August 2025 *Axios* reported that Dialog was preparing a permanent campus in the [[Washington, D.C.]] metropolitan area, with land in [[Northern Virginia]] under purchase. The campus is intended to host Dialog's gatherings on a fixed site rather than the rotating retreat locations used since 2006. The shift converts Dialog from an annual event into a standing physical institution, with the staffing, property records, and local footprint that a permanent site entails.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The timing, in the first year of the second Trump administration, placed the expansion adjacent to the federal contracting and intelligence communities that constitute Dialog's government-side membership. *Semafor* confirmed the land acquisition the following day. A fixed campus in Northern Virginia places Dialog physically within the same corridor as the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], the [[National Counterterrorism Center]], the [[Office of the Director of National Intelligence]], and the [[Pentagon]]-adjacent defense-contracting belt that anchors Palantir Technologies' government business.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Gawker Litigation and Press Suppression
|
||||
|
||||
Between 2007 and 2016 Thiel secretly funded the [[Bollea v. Gawker|Hulk Hogan lawsuit]] against [[Gawker Media]], retaining the lawyer [[Charles Hard]] and covering approximately ten million dollars in litigation costs. The resulting 140 million dollar judgment drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy in 2016. Thiel publicly acknowledged the funding in a *Forbes* interview, framing it as a response to Gawker's 2007 outing of him.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel paid the plaintiff's costs through a dedicated litigation vehicle, removing the settlement constraint that normally disciplines plaintiffs' lawyers, with [[Hulk Hogan|Hogan]] as the proxy whose own interests aligned with carrying the litigation to verdict. *WIRED* identified the outcome as a factor in Dialog's low public profile in the years that followed.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
|
||||
[^2]: Gelman, Andrew. "Dialog conference." *Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science* (Columbia University blog), April 2022. Referenced via *WIRED*; the original post is no longer available at statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu.
|
||||
[^3]: "Secretive, Peter Thiel-Founded 'Tech Bilderberg' Group Is Moving Up in the World." *Gizmodo,* August 2025. https://gizmodo.com/secretive-peter-thiel-founded-tech-bilderberg-group-is-moving-up-in-the-world-2000640214
|
||||
[^4]: U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein document release. 2013 Dialog retreat invitation forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein, November 2012. Document D-23831. https://epsteinexposed.com/documents/d-23831
|
||||
[^5]: "Peter Thiel Is Latest Billionaire Said to Have Met With Jeffrey Epstein." *New York Times,* May 18, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/jeffrey-epstein-peter-thiel.html
|
||||
[^6]: Fisher, Dan, and Lachlan Markay. "Scoop: Dialog, a secretive forum, plans D.C.-area campus." *Axios,* August 7, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/07/dialog-secret-network-thiel-hoffman
|
||||
[^7]: "Private club founded by Peter Thiel, Auren Hoffman eyes campus near DC." *Semafor,* August 8, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/article/08/08/2025/private-club-founded-by-peter-thiel-auren-hoffman-eyes-campus-near-dc
|
||||
[^8]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014.
|
||||
63
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Edge Foundation.md
Normal file
63
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Edge Foundation.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- EdgeFoundation
|
||||
- JeffreyEpstein
|
||||
- SciencePhilanthropy
|
||||
- ThirdCulture
|
||||
- BillionairesDinner
|
||||
- Edge
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Edge Foundation
|
||||
- Edge.org
|
||||
- Edge
|
||||
summary: "The Edge Foundation is John Brockman's nonprofit that runs Edge.org, hosts the annual Edge Question and Billionaires' Dinner, and drew a majority of its 2001 to 2017 revenue from foundations associated with Jeffrey Epstein."
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Edge Foundation is a New York nonprofit founded by literary agent [[John Brockman]] that operates the website [[Edge.org]], publishes the annual Edge Question, and for years hosted the Billionaires' Dinner. Foundations associated with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] provided $638,000 of nearly $857,000 in revenue the organization received between 2001 and 2017, making Epstein its dominant backer during that period.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Reality Club
|
||||
|
||||
The Edge Foundation was incorporated in 1988 as an outgrowth of the Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals that Brockman had convened from 1981 to 1996 in restaurants, lofts, and other venues around New York. The foundation describes its mission as promoting inquiry into scientific and intellectual ideas in the spirit of the "third culture" that Brockman set out in his 1995 book *The Third Culture*, in which scientists who write for a general public take the place of the traditional literary intellectual.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The third-culture framing extended [[C. P. Snow]]'s 1959 lecture on the divide between literary and scientific cultures, recasting working scientists as the public intellectuals "rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives." Brockman ran the site as a program of the foundation alongside his agency [[Brockman Inc.]], with [[Katinka Matson]] listed as co-founder, and many Edge participants were also agency clients whose books the firm sold.[^4][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Brockman launched Edge.org in 1996 as the online successor to the Reality Club, posting long-form conversations and essays by scientists and authors. The journalist [[John Naughton]] called the site "the world's smartest website" in a 2012 *Observer* profile, a phrase the foundation has since used in its own materials. Contributors over the years included [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Steven Pinker]], [[Daniel Kahneman]], [[Daniel Dennett]], [[Stephen Hawking]], [[Lawrence Krauss]], [[Marvin Minsky]], [[Martin Nowak]], and [[George Church]].[^5][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Edge Question and the World Question Center
|
||||
|
||||
Beginning in 1998, Edge posed an annual question to its contributors through what Brockman called the World Question Center, with prompts including "What is your dangerous idea?," "What will change everything?," and "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The answers were drawn from a contributor pool that one tally put at roughly 80 percent male.[^1][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The annual responses fed a long-running book series, with collected volumes published as *What We Believe but Cannot Prove*, *What Is Your Dangerous Idea?*, *What Have You Changed Your Mind About?*, *This Will Change Everything*, *This Explains Everything*, and *Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?*, among others. Brockman closed the annual question in 2018 after twenty editions, framing the final question as the finale of the series.[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The Third Culture program ran in parallel, with Edge publishing the conversations, video, and essays that fed Brockman's edited anthologies and supplied his agency clients with a steady channel to a general readership. The foundation positioned its participants as a continuation of the figures Brockman profiled in *The Third Culture* in 1995.[^4][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Billionaires' Dinner
|
||||
|
||||
Brockman hosted an annual dinner from 1999, timed to the [[TED Conference]], that became known as the Billionaires' Dinner, seating Edge contributors alongside technology and finance figures such as [[Jeff Bezos]], [[Sergey Brin]], and [[Elon Musk]]. Katinka Matson co-organized the events, which Brockman at one point tried to rebrand as "The Science Dinner" before reverting to the original name.[^1][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
Epstein was photographed at the dinners in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004 and attended the 2011 dinner alongside Bezos and Brin; the last dinner was held in March 2015. Photographs from the 2002 and 2003 dinners showed Epstein associate [[Sarah Kellen]] seated with Brockman and his son [[Max Brockman]], and those images were removed from the site after 2019.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The Edge Foundation also awarded a $100,000 prize to the quantum-computing physicist [[David Deutsch]] using funds supplied by Epstein, a connection Deutsch said he had been unaware of. He told *BuzzFeed News* that Edge had told him the sponsor's name when he won but that "the name meant nothing to me: I'd never heard of him."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Epstein Funding and the 2019 Reckoning
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation]] and other Epstein-controlled entities, including Epstein's Gratitude America and the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, were among the listed funders of the Edge Foundation, and financial records reviewed by *BuzzFeed News* showed those entities provided $638,000 of the roughly $857,000 Edge received from 2001 to 2017. Epstein gave at least $50,000 a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011, with no gifts recorded from 2006 to 2008 during his Florida case and imprisonment.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Epstein's last recorded contribution was $30,000 in 2015, after which Edge raised only several thousand dollars from a single donor over 2016 and 2017. For multiple years Epstein was effectively the foundation's sole donor, and his withdrawal after 2015 coincided with the end of the dinner series.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
After Epstein's July 2019 arrest, the science writer [[Carl Zimmer]] asked to be removed from Edge, the author [[Naomi Wolf]] left Brockman Inc. on July 31, 2019, citing both Epstein's funding and the appearance of Sarah Kellen on the site, and [[Evgeny Morozov]] called on Brockman to close the foundation while publishing a 2013 email in which Brockman had tried to introduce him to Epstein. Photographs showing Kellen at Edge dinners were taken down. Most listed contributors did not publicly disassociate from the foundation, and the site continued to host its archived conversations.[^8][^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation And Reaped The Benefits," *BuzzFeed News,* 2019, on the $638,000 of $857,000 figure, the Billionaires' Dinner, the Deutsch prize, the contributor demographics, and the 2019 departures. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation
|
||||
[^2]: Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation And Reaped The Benefits." *BuzzFeed News,* 2019, on the Epstein-linked contributions of $638,000 of nearly $857,000 received 2001 to 2017 and the $30,000 gift in 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation
|
||||
[^3]: "About Edge," Edge.org, on the 1988 incorporation of the Edge Foundation as an outgrowth of the Reality Club. https://www.edge.org/about-edge
|
||||
[^4]: "About Edge," Edge.org, on the Reality Club's 1981 to 1996 meetings, the third culture, and the 1996 launch. https://www.edge.org/about-edge
|
||||
[^5]: Naughton, John. "The Man Who Runs The World's Smartest Website," *The Observer,* January 8, 2012. https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_naughton-the-man-who-runs-the-worlds-smartest-website-in-the-observer
|
||||
[^6]: Brockman, John. *The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.* Simon & Schuster, 1995.
|
||||
[^7]: "The Edge 'Billionaires' Dinner'" event pages, Edge.org, on the 1999 start of the dinner at the TED conference, the attendee mix, and Brockman's naming of the event. https://www.edge.org/events/edge-dinners
|
||||
[^8]: "Edge Foundation President May Have Been Jeffrey Epstein's Connection to Intellectual Elite," *InsideHook,* 2019, on the gatekeeper role, the 2013 Morozov email, and the 2019 reckoning. https://www.insidehook.com/culture/edge-foundation-president-may-have-been-jeffrey-epsteins-connection-to-intellectual-elite
|
||||
55
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Effective Ventures.md
Normal file
55
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Effective Ventures.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- EffectiveVentures
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- FTX
|
||||
- Longtermism
|
||||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Effective Ventures
|
||||
- Effective Ventures Foundation
|
||||
- Effective Ventures US
|
||||
- EV
|
||||
summary: "Effective Ventures was the umbrella charity that legally housed the central effective-altruism organizations, took roughly 27 million dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX in 2022, repaid all of it to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a 2024 settlement, and then resolved to spin out all of its projects into independent bodies."
|
||||
location: "Oxford, England; United States"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Effective Ventures was the umbrella organization that served as the legal and operational home of the central institutions of [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]]. It consisted of two affiliated charities, the Effective Ventures Foundation in the United Kingdom and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, which between them hosted projects including the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], [[Giving What We Can]], and the EA Funds. The group received about 27 million dollars from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]'s [[FTX]] and its associated foundation in 2022, repaid the full amount to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a January 2024 settlement, and subsequently decided to dissolve the umbrella and spin its projects out as independent organizations.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Structure and Projects
|
||||
|
||||
Effective Ventures operated as a fiscal sponsor, a single charitable structure under which a number of distinct projects ran without each having to maintain its own legal entity, board, and back-office functions. The arrangement covered two charities, the Effective Ventures Foundation registered in England and Wales and the separately incorporated Effective Ventures Foundation USA, sharing staff and governance across the Atlantic. The model let the constituent projects share legal, financial, and operational services while presenting themselves publicly under their own names.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The projects housed under Effective Ventures included the Centre for Effective Altruism, which runs the movement's conferences and community infrastructure; the career-advising organization 80,000 Hours, cofounded by [[William MacAskill]] and Benjamin Todd; Giving What We Can, the pledge organization for charitable donation also cofounded by MacAskill and [[Toby Ord]]; the grantmaking platform EA Funds; the Forethought Foundation; and at various times other research and outreach efforts. Several of the people who ran Effective Ventures and its projects, including MacAskill, also held roles in Bankman-Fried's philanthropic operation.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The FTX Money and the Settlement
|
||||
|
||||
In 2022 entities within Effective Ventures received approximately 26.8 million dollars in grants from FTX and the FTX Foundation, part of the wave of money Bankman-Fried directed into effective-altruism and longtermist causes before his exchange collapsed in November 2022. When FTX failed and entered bankruptcy, its estate moved to recover money that FTX and Alameda had paid out, including charitable grants, on the basis that the funds had originated in customer deposits misappropriated in the fraud.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Effective Ventures announced in January 2024 that it had reached a settlement with the FTX bankruptcy estate under which it returned 26,786,503 dollars, a sum the organization stated was equal to one hundred percent of the funds it and its projects had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation. The repayment, which the group covered in part by drawing on reserves and other donors, removed the threat of clawback litigation but consumed a large share of the organization's resources.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Wytham Abbey
|
||||
|
||||
Among the assets Effective Ventures had acquired in the period of FTX-era abundance was Wytham Abbey, a fifteenth-century manor house near Oxford, bought in 2022 for a reported price of about 15 million pounds to serve as a conference and workshop venue for the effective-altruism community. The purchase, made with funding connected to the movement's major donors, drew public criticism as an extravagant use of charitable money and became a symbol of the movement's spending during its flush years.[^5][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
After the FTX collapse and the settlement, Effective Ventures put the property up for sale, and it was sold in 2024 at a reported loss of about 14.5 million dollars against the purchase and associated costs. The sale was part of the broader unwinding of the organization's holdings and commitments in the wake of the FTX failure.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Decision to Spin Out
|
||||
|
||||
In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, which implicated people close to the organization and exposed the concentration of legal and reputational risk in a single shared structure, the boards of Effective Ventures UK and Effective Ventures USA decided to spin out all of the group's projects into independent organizations rather than continue as an umbrella. The decision followed an external investigation, commissioned after the collapse, into the organizations' ties to Bankman-Fried.[^1][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The dissolution proceeded over the following two years. 80,000 Hours announced its plan to become independent in December 2023 and completed its spin-out in May 2025, establishing new United Kingdom entities; the Centre for Effective Altruism announced in January 2024 that it would leave the umbrella and merge with EA Funds, targeting independence by mid-2025. The boards stated that they would not take on new sponsored projects to replace those that departed.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV," Effective Altruism Forum, on the two legal entities, the hosted projects, the settlement, and the decision to spin out all projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev
|
||||
[^2]: "Effective Ventures Settles $26.8M FTX Donations Case," The Crypto Times, January 31, 2024, on the return of 26,786,503 dollars equal to one hundred percent of the FTX funds received. https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/01/31/effective-ventures-settles-26-8m-ftx-donations-case/
|
||||
[^3]: "Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum topic page, on the fiscal-sponsor structure and the constituent projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/effective-ventures
|
||||
[^4]: "Asset Recovery: Effective Ventures Return $27M in Donations to FTX Bankruptcy Estate," Coinfomania, on the clawback context and the recovery of customer-deposit-sourced grants. https://coinfomania.com/asset-recovery-effective-ventures-return-27m-in-donations-to-ftx-bankruptcy-estate/
|
||||
[^5]: "FTX-linked Effective Ventures sells UK manor at $14.5M loss," Protos, on the 2022 purchase of Wytham Abbey for about 15 million pounds and its 2024 sale at a reported loss. https://protos.com/ftx-linked-effective-ventures-sells-uk-manor-at-14-5m-loss/
|
||||
[^6]: "Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum, on the post-FTX investigation and the board decision to spin out the projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AuSah98NtR5qv8zQA/reflections-and-lessons-from-effective-ventures-1
|
||||
[^7]: "80,000 Hours completes spin-out from Effective Ventures," 80,000 Hours, May 2025, on the December 2023 announcement, the May 2025 completion, and the Centre for Effective Altruism's planned merger with EA Funds. https://80000hours.org/2025/05/80000-hours-completes-spin-out-from-effective-ventures/
|
||||
|
|
@ -1,50 +1,74 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Research Organization"
|
||||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- California
|
||||
- Human_Potential
|
||||
- EsalenInstitute
|
||||
- HumanPotentialMovement
|
||||
- Counterculture
|
||||
- BigSur
|
||||
- CitizenDiplomacy
|
||||
- Parapsychology
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
- FBI
|
||||
- Soviet_Union
|
||||
- Cold_War
|
||||
- Counterculture
|
||||
- Remote_Viewing
|
||||
summary: "The Esalen Institute is a California retreat center founded in 1962 at Big Sur whose Soviet-American Exchange Program attracted CIA and FBI monitoring, with both agencies offering founder Michael Murphy recruitment, which he declined."
|
||||
start: 1962-01-01
|
||||
- ColdWar
|
||||
- RemoteViewing
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Esalen
|
||||
- Esalen Institute
|
||||
summary: "Esalen Institute is the Big Sur retreat center founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price that became the seedbed of the Human Potential movement and whose Soviet-American citizen-diplomacy program drew documented CIA and FBI monitoring."
|
||||
start: 1962
|
||||
location: "Big Sur, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Esalen Institute is a retreat center and educational organization founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price at Big Sur on the California coast. It became the principal institutional home of the American human potential movement, hosting seminars, workshops, and residency programs drawing on psychology, Eastern religion, somatic practice, and consciousness research. Its Soviet-American Exchange Program, begun in 1979-1980, created documented interfaces with both American and Soviet intelligence communities.[^1]
|
||||
Esalen Institute is a residential retreat and education center on the Big Sur coast of California, founded in 1962 by [[Michael Murphy]] and [[Richard Price|Richard "Dick" Price]] to host seminars on what [[Aldous Huxley]] had called "human potentialities." Built on a clifftop property with mineral hot springs that Murphy's family had owned since 1910, it became the principal gathering place of the Human Potential movement and a laboratory for humanistic and transpersonal psychology, Gestalt therapy, encounter groups, bodywork, Eastern meditation, and psychedelic research.[^1][^2] The name comes from the Esselen, the Native people who frequented the springs before European settlement.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Soviet-American Exchange Program
|
||||
### The 1962 Founding
|
||||
|
||||
Murphy and his wife Dulce established Esalen's Soviet-American Exchange Program beginning in 1979-1980, framing it as "citizen diplomacy" - informal people-to-people contact intended to reduce Cold War tensions across sectors that formal diplomacy did not easily reach. Program participants over the following decade included American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, academic researchers, business figures, writers, and, within a few years of the program's inception, individuals who had worked for the CIA and the KGB.
|
||||
The land at Slate's Hot Springs, where the writer Thomas Slate had homesteaded in the 1880s, was bought in 1910 by Dr. Henry Murphy, a Salinas physician and the grandfather of Michael Murphy, who intended to run a health spa there. After California's hot-springs resorts lost their custom and the Big Sur Hot Springs property fell into disuse around 1960, Murphy and Price, two Stanford graduates who had met in 1960 at the American Academy of Asian Studies and the Cultural Integration Fellowship circle in San Francisco, visited the property in 1961 and began planning an educational forum. Both had studied under the [[Stanford University|Stanford]] comparative-religion scholar [[Frederic Spiegelberg]], and both had spent time in Eastern spiritual practice, Murphy at the [[Sri Aurobindo]] Ashram in Pondicherry and Price studying with [[Alan Watts]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The operational director of Esalen's Soviet exchanges was Jim Hickman. His policy, and Esalen's institutional policy, was to answer honestly any questions from either American or Soviet intelligence about what the program was doing in the Soviet Union, without volunteering information proactively. Hickman reported that the FBI would appear at various locations worldwide and request polygraph interviews. Both the CIA and KGB initially suspected Esalen of being a front for the other side.
|
||||
The first program ran in the fall of 1962 under the title "The Human Potentiality," a phrase drawn from Aldous Huxley, who in lectures and writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s had argued that ordinary people use only a fraction of their latent capacities. Alan Watts gave one of the earliest Esalen lectures in January 1962, and [[Abraham Maslow]], the humanistic psychologist whose theories of self-actualization and "peak experience" supplied much of the movement's vocabulary, arrived in the summer of 1962 and became an important patron after stumbling on the place by accident. Esalen incorporated as a nonprofit and published its first catalog in 1963.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1989, Esalen facilitated Boris Yeltsin's first trip to the United States. Murphy and Esalen associates subsequently attributed Yeltsin's embrace of market economics in part to his exposure during this trip.[^1]
|
||||
### Fritz Perls, Gestalt, and the Encounter Groups
|
||||
|
||||
The German-born psychiatrist [[Fritz Perls]], co-founder of Gestalt therapy, began offering workshops at Esalen in late 1963 and became a permanent resident in 1964, running his confrontational present-moment sessions until he left in 1969. Perls made Esalen the center of the Gestalt revival and worked alongside [[Ida Rolf]], the originator of the deep-tissue bodywork called Rolfing, and [[Moshe Feldenkrais]], whose somatic methods Price championed; Perls and Rolf collaborated on the relation of mind and body.[^4][^5] The phrase "human potential movement" was coined in 1965 by the Look magazine senior editor [[George Leonard]] in conversation with Murphy, after Leonard's 1964 article on education drew heavy reader interest in the term "human potential"; Leonard suggested adding "movement" to name the humanistic current he and Murphy hoped to foster, and he later served as an Esalen president emeritus.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The psychologist [[Will Schutz]] arrived in 1967 and made the encounter group, an intense small-group practice aimed at emotional honesty and the breaking down of social masks, synonymous with Esalen; his sessions drew on techniques from Maslow, Huxley, [[Margaret Mead]], Feldenkrais, Rolf, Perls, Alexander Lowen, and Virginia Satir. The anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]], a figure central to [[Cybernetics]] and to the [[Whole Earth Catalog]] milieu through his "ecology of mind," lectured and lived at Esalen in his later years, and the Czech-born psychiatrist [[Stanislav Grof]], a pioneer of [[LSD]] psychotherapy who developed [[Holotropic Breathwork]] after psychedelics were banned, became a scholar-in-residence. [[Joan Baez]] led a folk-music workshop in 1964, and [[Hunter S. Thompson]] worked as a caretaker on the property in the early 1960s.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Soviet-American Exchange and Track Two
|
||||
|
||||
In the 1970s Murphy grew interested in Soviet [[parapsychology]] and [[telepathy]] research and traveled to the [[Soviet Union|USSR]] to meet its experimenters, contacts that opened a channel between Esalen and Soviet officials. In 1980, with Cold War relations frozen, American figures convened at Esalen and concluded that action beyond official diplomacy was needed, and Murphy, his wife [[Dulce Murphy]], and [[Jim Hickman]] founded the [[Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program]], a form of unofficial "track-two" or citizen diplomacy. The program ran exchanges of astronauts and cosmonauts, scientists, writers, and business figures, and helped produce the first satellite "spacebridges" linking Soviet and American citizens in live televised conversation; within a few years its participants included people who had worked for the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] and the [[KGB]].[^7][^8][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The program invited [[Boris Yeltsin]], then a rising Soviet politician, to make his first visit to the United States in September 1989; Yeltsin arrived in New York on September 9, 1989, toured ten cities, and was reportedly struck by an ordinary Houston supermarket, an episode his biographers describe as deepening his doubts about the Soviet system. The exchange was renamed [[Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy]] in 2004 and continues as an independent organization. Esalen's own histories, and the historian Jeffrey J. Kripal's *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion* (2007), credit the program with contributing to the climate of glasnost and perestroika that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[^7][^8][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### CIA and FBI Monitoring
|
||||
|
||||
CIA monitoring of Esalen's Soviet exchange activities is documented by the CIA's possession of a clipping from Newsweek, published January 10, 1983, headlined "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy." The article was prompted by Jim Hickman leading a Human Resources seminar in Moscow, one of the first Esalen-organized exchanges inside the USSR. The CIA document (CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1) is available through the CIA FOIA Reading Room at cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100380026-1 and through the Internet Archive. The document is an open-source press clipping filed in classified CIA records, indicating CIA monitoring of the program rather than an analytical intelligence product.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The FBI maintained Esalen surveillance files from at least 1978 through 1992. These records, including ELSUR (electronic surveillance) documentation, were released through FOIA requests and are accessible at the FBI Vault (vault.fbi.gov/esalen-institute) and the Internet Archive.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Murphy has stated publicly that both the CIA and FBI actively recruited him and that he declined both approaches: "I never succumbed."[^1]
|
||||
The Soviet exchanges drew the attention of intelligence agencies on both sides. Hickman, the program's operational director, said his policy was to answer honestly any questions from American or Soviet intelligence about the program's activities in the Soviet Union without volunteering information, and he reported that the FBI would appear at locations worldwide to request polygraph interviews; both the CIA and the KGB initially suspected Esalen of being a front for the other side. CIA monitoring is documented by the agency's retention of a January 10, 1983 *Newsweek* clipping headlined "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy," filed in its records as document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1, and the FBI maintained Esalen surveillance files, including electronic-surveillance records, from at least 1978 through 1992, released through the FBI Vault. Murphy has said that both the CIA and the FBI tried to recruit him and that he declined, telling an interviewer "I never succumbed."[^10][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Intelligence Community Overlap: Kit Green and SRI
|
||||
|
||||
The intelligence community's interest in Esalen extended beyond its Soviet exchange activities to include the organization's broader connections to the human potential and consciousness research community. Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, a CIA neurophysiologist (Ph.D. 1969, M.D. 1976) who joined the CIA in 1969 and rose to Deputy Division Director for Life Sciences, was the CIA's principal liaison to the [[Stanford Research Institute]] remote viewing program from its inception in 1972. On June 27, 1972, Hal Puthoff wrote to Green, then occupying the "Life Science Desk" in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, about Ingo Swann's magnetometer experiment at SRI; this initiated the CIA's covert funding of what eventually became a 22-year, $19.993 million remote viewing research program.[^3]
|
||||
The intelligence community's interest in the California consciousness-research milieu extended to the overlap between Esalen's human-potential circle and the remote-viewing program at the [[Stanford Research Institute]]. Christopher "Kit" Green, a CIA neurophysiologist who joined the agency in 1969 and rose to Deputy Division Director for Life Sciences, was the CIA's principal liaison to the SRI remote-viewing program from its inception in 1972. On June 27, 1972, [[Hal Puthoff]] wrote to Green, then at the "Life Science Desk" in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, about [[Ingo Swann]]'s magnetometer experiment at SRI, a letter that initiated the agency's covert funding of what became a 22-year, roughly 20-million-dollar remote-viewing research program.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
Esalen's human potential research community and the SRI remote viewing program overlapped through shared figures and shared intellectual culture in the California consciousness research milieu of the 1970s; several individuals moved between both institutions. Green received the CIA's National Intelligence Medal for classified work in the period 1979-1983. Whether that work was institutionally connected to Esalen's program specifically, as distinct from the SRI remote viewing research with which he was documented to be involved, is not established in available public records.[^3]
|
||||
Esalen's human-potential research community and the SRI remote-viewing program overlapped through shared figures and a shared intellectual culture, and several individuals moved between the two. Green received the CIA's National Intelligence Medal for classified work in the period 1979 to 1983, though whether that work was institutionally connected to Esalen specifically, as distinct from the SRI research with which he was documented to be involved, is not established in public records.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Academic Treatment
|
||||
### The Courtship of Silicon Valley
|
||||
|
||||
Jeffrey J. Kripal's "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion" (University of Chicago Press, 2007) is the principal scholarly treatment of Esalen's history, placing its Cold War activities within a broader intellectual and spiritual history. Kripal documents Esalen's Soviet exchange program and CIA adjacency as part of what he characterizes as Esalen's role at the intersection of "Cold War espionage" and "ecstatic religiosity."[^1]
|
||||
By the 2010s the center, long known as a "hippie hotel," had turned toward the wealth of the nearby San Francisco Bay Area technology industry. Under a new generation of leaders, including the former Google product manager [[Ben Tauber]], who became chief executive in 2017, Esalen began inviting ethicists, futurists, and technologists to retreats addressing the moral quandaries of the people building consumer technology, drawing executives and engineers from companies such as Google and Facebook. Press coverage of the period described the institute marketing its programs on personal transformation to a Silicon Valley clientele anxious about the social effects of the products it was shipping.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
Gregory Bateson had spent his last years lecturing and living at Esalen, and his cybernetic "ecology of mind" had also shaped [[Stewart Brand]], who published Bateson in the *Whole Earth Catalog* he launched in 1968 and in the WELL online community he later cofounded. Esalen's later programming on artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the psychology of technology was reported by outlets including The New York Times and Quartz.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Kripal, Jeffrey J. *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion*. University of Chicago Press, 2007. "Hot Tub Diplomacy: How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War." Atlas Obscura. atlasobscura.com.
|
||||
[^2]: CIA FOIA Reading Room, document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1. cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100380026-1. Also: Internet Archive, archive.org/details/CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1. FBI Vault, Esalen Institute files. vault.fbi.gov/esalen-institute.
|
||||
[^3]: Puthoff, Hal. "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute." Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996. Green, Christopher. NCBI Biographical Sketch, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207949/.
|
||||
[^1]: "About Esalen: History, Mission, Vision, and Leadership," Esalen Institute, on the 1962 founding by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, the inspiration of Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, Murphy's year and a half at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, Price's study with Alan Watts, and the land's stewardship with the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County. https://www.esalen.org/about
|
||||
[^2]: Harper, Steven K. "A History of Esalen Institute," on the Esselen people, Thomas Slate's 1880s homestead at Slate's Hot Springs, Dr. Henry Murphy's 1910 purchase, the 1937 completion of Highway 1 and the Big Sur Hot Springs resort, Murphy and Price at Stanford, Alan Watts's January 1962 lecture, Maslow's summer 1962 visit, Gia-fu Feng, and Fritz Perls. https://www.stevenkharper.com/ahistoryofesaleninstitute.html
|
||||
[^3]: "Abraham Maslow," Esalen Origin Stories, on Maslow's self-actualization and peak experience and his patronage of Esalen; and on Huxley's lectures on "human potentialities" as the source of the first 1962 seminar series. https://www.esalen.org/origin/maslow
|
||||
[^4]: "Fritz Perls," on Perls's affiliation with Esalen from 1964, his development of Gestalt therapy as resident pioneer, and his collaboration with Ida Rolf on mind and body; with Stanislav Grof and Gregory Bateson as Esalen figures. Standard reference accounts of Perls's Esalen residency, 1964 to 1969.
|
||||
[^5]: "Will Schutz, In Memoriam," Esalen, on Schutz's 1967 arrival, his making encounter groups synonymous with Esalen, and his drawing on Maslow, Huxley, Mead, Feldenkrais, Rolf, Perls, Lowen, and Satir. https://www.esalen.org/in-memoriam/will-schutz
|
||||
[^6]: "George Leonard," Esalen Origin Stories, on Leonard as Look magazine senior editor, his 1964 article on education using "human potential," and the 1965 coinage of "human potential movement" in conversation with Michael Murphy. https://www.esalen.org/origin/george-leonard
|
||||
[^7]: "Forty Years Later, Track Two Continues to Expand its Global Reach," Esalen Journal, on the 1980 convening at Esalen, the founding of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program by Michael and Dulce Murphy and Jim Hickman, the spacebridges, the 1989 Yeltsin invitation, and the 2004 renaming to Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy. https://www.esalen.org/post/forty-years-later-track-two-continues-to-expand-its-global-reach
|
||||
[^8]: "1989 visit by Boris Yeltsin to the United States," on Yeltsin's arrival in New York on September 9, 1989, his tour of ten cities, and the Houston supermarket episode; and "Michael Murphy Helped Launch Human Potential Movement More Than 40 Years Ago," Voice of America, on Murphy's 1970s interest in Soviet parapsychology and the resulting exchange. https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2008-04-22-voa27/345326.html
|
||||
[^9]: "The philosophy that could have stopped Silicon Valley's crisis of conscience before it started," Quartz, on Silicon Valley executives from companies such as Google and Facebook attending Esalen and the leadership's invitation of ethicists and futurists; and reporting on the former Google executive Ben Tauber becoming Esalen's chief executive in 2017. https://qz.com/1161704
|
||||
[^10]: Kripal, Jeffrey J. *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.* University of Chicago Press, 2007; and "Hot Tub Diplomacy: How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War," Atlas Obscura, on the Soviet-American exchange, the CIA and KGB interest, and the Cold War framing.
|
||||
[^11]: CIA FOIA Reading Room, document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1, the January 10, 1983 *Newsweek* "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy" clipping retained in CIA records, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100380026-1 ; and the FBI Vault, Esalen Institute files, surveillance records from 1978 to 1992, https://vault.fbi.gov/esalen-institute
|
||||
[^12]: Puthoff, Harold. "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute," *Journal of Scientific Exploration,* vol. 10, no. 1, 1996; and Christopher Green, NCBI biographical sketch, on the June 27, 1972 Puthoff letter to Green, Green's CIA liaison role to the SRI program, and his National Intelligence Medal. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207949/
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
55
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/FTX Future Fund.md
Normal file
55
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/FTX Future Fund.md
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|
|
@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- FTXFutureFund
|
||||
- SamBankmanFried
|
||||
- FTX
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- Longtermism
|
||||
- NickBeckstead
|
||||
summary: "The FTX Future Fund was the philanthropic vehicle launched in February 2022 by Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX Foundation, run by Nick Beckstead with Will MacAskill and others, which committed roughly $160 million to longtermist, AI-safety, and biosecurity causes before its entire team resigned and the money was clawed back when FTX collapsed in November 2022."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California; Nassau, Bahamas"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The FTX Future Fund was a philanthropic vehicle launched in February 2022 by the FTX Foundation, the charitable arm of the cryptocurrency empire of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]. Run by [[Nick Beckstead]] with the philosopher [[William MacAskill]] and a small team, it became the flashiest and most aggressive funder of [[Longtermism|longtermist]], AI-safety, and biosecurity work within the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, committing roughly 160 million dollars in its nine months of operation before its entire leadership resigned and the fund collapsed alongside [[FTX]] in November 2022. The money was traced to defrauded FTX customers, and the bankruptcy estate later pursued grantees to claw it back.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The February 2022 Launch
|
||||
|
||||
The Future Fund was announced in late February 2022 with a declared ambition far larger than its eventual spending: it said it planned to distribute at least 100 million dollars in 2022 and might deploy up to 1 billion dollars that year, drawing on the fortune Bankman-Fried had built at FTX and the trading firm [[Alameda Research]]. Its stated areas of interest were the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biological risk, improving institutions, economic growth, great-power relations, and effective altruism itself, an explicitly longtermist agenda focused on improving humanity's long-run prospects. The fund's leadership came directly from the movement's intellectual core: Beckstead, a philosopher who had run the long-term-future grantmaking at Open Philanthropy, served as chief executive, and the team included MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher who had cofounded the movement and personally recruited Bankman-Fried into "earning to give," along with [[Leopold Aschenbrenner]], [[Avital Balwit]], and [[Ketan Ramakrishnan]].[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The fund operated through three mechanisms: an open call for applications, staff-led grants drawn from a longlist of priorities, and a regranting program that gave discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. The regranting program was the fund's signature innovation, onboarding more than 100 regrantors with their own budgets plus more than 50 grant recommenders, and the fund set aside more than 100 million dollars for them to deploy over a six-month experiment running from April to October 2022. This structure pushed money out at unusual speed and with unusual decentralization compared with the deliberative pace of [[Good Ventures]] and Open Philanthropy.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Regranting Program and the Money
|
||||
|
||||
By its June 2022 public update the Future Fund reported making 262 grants and investments totaling approximately 132 million dollars. Of that, staff-led grantmaking accounted for about 73 million dollars across 25 grants, the open call had drawn more than 1,700 applications of which 69 were funded for about 26 million dollars, and the regranting program had deployed about 31 million dollars across 168 grants. Broken down by cause, effective altruism had received about 34 million dollars across 61 grants, biorisk about 30 million across 30 grants, artificial intelligence about 20 million across 76 grants, and a program to recruit exceptional people about 10 million across 18 grants. The largest 41 grants, each above 500,000 dollars, accounted for about 109 million dollars of the total.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Over its full run the fund committed on the order of 160 million dollars, well short of the 100-million-to-1-billion ambition it had announced but still a sum that flooded the longtermist and AI-safety field, where many organizations had previously depended on the slower Good Ventures money. Recipients spanned AI-safety research groups, biosecurity projects, academic fellowships, media and recruitment efforts, and forecasting work, and the speed of the deployment meant that by the time FTX failed a large share of the committed money had been paid out and in some cases already spent.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The November 2022 Collapse
|
||||
|
||||
On November 11, 2022, the same day FTX filed for bankruptcy, the Future Fund's entire team announced its resignation in a post on the EA Forum. Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, and Ramakrishnan signed the statement, joined by MacAskill, writing that they were devastated that many committed grants could not be honored, that their hearts went out to the thousands of FTX customers whose finances had been jeopardized or destroyed, and that to the extent FTX leadership had engaged in deception or dishonesty they condemned it in the strongest possible terms. They said they were unable to perform their work or process grants and directed grantees to a reachout address. Bankman-Fried was later convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023 after FTX collapsed with billions of dollars in customer funds missing.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The collapse left grantees in legal and financial limbo, because the money had originated with an entity now revealed to have been insolvent and, on the government's case, funded by misappropriated customer deposits. A March 2023 *TIME* investigation reported that effective-altruism leaders had been warned about Bankman-Fried's conduct years before the failure, fueling the charge that the movement's consequentialist reasoning had helped rationalize his behavior.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Clawbacks
|
||||
|
||||
The FTX bankruptcy estate, represented by the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, moved to recover money transferred before the bankruptcy under preference and fraudulent-conveyance theories, which reach transactions made up to two years before the filing even when the recipient did nothing wrong and had no knowledge of wrongdoing. Future Fund grantees received demand letters seeking repayment, and many returned funds or negotiated settlements rather than litigate in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The episode meant that money the field had treated as a windfall in 2022 became a liability that recipients could be ordered to give back.[^8][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The largest single settlement involved [[Effective Ventures]], the umbrella charity housing the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], and [[Giving What We Can]], which agreed on December 13, 2023 to pay the FTX estate 26,786,503 dollars, an amount equal to 100 percent of the funds its entities had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation in 2022. An independent investigation by the law firm Mintz found no evidence that anyone at Effective Ventures had known of the criminal fraud, and the organization went on to spin its constituent projects out as independent legal entities. Open Philanthropy separately invited grantees harmed by the FTX collapse to apply for replacement funding, partially backfilling commitments the Future Fund could no longer keep.[^10][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Announcing the Future Fund," reposted at Marginal Revolution, February-March 2022, on the February 2022 launch, the goal of distributing at least 100 million dollars in 2022 and potentially up to 1 billion, the areas of interest, Beckstead as chief executive, and the team. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/announcing-the-future-fund.html
|
||||
[^2]: "The FTX Future Fund team has resigned," EA Forum, November 11, 2022, on the resignation of Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, Ramakrishnan, and MacAskill and their statement about FTX customers and grant commitments. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1
|
||||
[^3]: "Future Fund," EA Forum topic entry, on the launch, the team (Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, MacAskill, Ramakrishnan), and the regranting program. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/future-fund
|
||||
[^4]: "Future Fund June 2022 Update," EA Forum, on the 262 grants totaling approximately 132 million dollars, the regranting program (more than 100 regrantors, more than 100 million dollars set aside, 31 million deployed across 168 grants), the open call (more than 1,700 applications, 69 funded for 26 million), staff-led grants (25 grants, 73 million), and the cause breakdowns. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/paMYXYFYbbjpdjgbt/future-fund-june-2022-update
|
||||
[^5]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, November 2, 2023.
|
||||
[^6]: "FTX Foundation Shutters Effective Altruism Fund as Key Execs Resign," Decrypt, November 2022, on the resignation and the fund's grantmaking. https://decrypt.co/114197/ftx-foundation-shutters-effective-altruism-fund-key-execs-resign
|
||||
[^7]: "Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed," *TIME,* March 2023. https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/
|
||||
[^8]: "Claw-Back Litigation in FTX Bankruptcy FAQs," Morris James LLP, on the preference and fraudulent-conveyance mechanisms, the two-year reach, and the demand-letter-then-complaint process in the District of Delaware. https://www.morrisjames.com/p/102j9xu/claw-back-litigation-in-ftx-bankruptcy-faqs/
|
||||
[^9]: "Clawbacks: Probably don't spend FTX grantee money for the next few days(?)," EA Forum, on grantees facing demands to return Future Fund money. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Bq3PFRfzaEEAATti/clawbacks-probably-don-t-spend-ftx-grantee-money-for-the
|
||||
[^10]: "EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV," EA Forum, on the December 13, 2023 Effective Ventures settlement of 26,786,503 dollars equal to 100 percent of funds received from FTX and the FTX Foundation in 2022, the Mintz investigation, and the spinning out of CEA, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev
|
||||
[^11]: "Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events," EA Forum, November 2022, on Open Philanthropy inviting FTX-affected grantees to apply for replacement funding. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HPdWWetJbv4z8eJEe/open-phil-is-seeking-applications-from-grantees-impacted-by
|
||||
49
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Founders Fund.md
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49
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Founders Fund.md
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|
|
@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- FoundersFund
|
||||
- VentureCapital
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- PayPalMafia
|
||||
- SiliconValley
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Founders Fund Management LLC
|
||||
summary: "Founders Fund is a San Francisco venture capital firm founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, whose early investments in Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries made it the financial vehicle of the Thiel commercial network."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Founders Fund is a [[San Francisco]] venture capital firm founded in 2005 by [[Peter Thiel]], [[Ken Howery]], and [[Luke Nosek]], all of them [[PayPal Mafia]] principals. The firm's early investments included [[Facebook]] (Thiel's 2004 angel investment of 500,000 dollars was the firm's first major deal and produced a roughly two billion dollar return), [[SpaceX]], [[Palantir Technologies]], [[Airbnb]], [[Stripe]], and [[Anduril Industries]]. The firm has functioned as the financial vehicle of the Thiel commercial network: it concentrates capital in firms pursuing monopoly positions in domains (payments, defense, space, biotechnology, sovereign-grade infrastructure) the firm judges foundational.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the PayPal Mafia Origin
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel founded Founders Fund in 2005 with Howery and Nosek, both of them PayPal cofounders, after the 2002 PayPal sale to [[eBay]]. The PayPal Mafia lineage shaped the firm's strategy and its deal flow: the firm's early portfolio drew on the personal networks of the PayPal cohort, and the PayPal anti-fraud data architecture transferred into the Palantir Technologies thesis the firm seeded the same year. Howery served as the firm's first managing partner and later as U.S. Ambassador to [[Sweden]] under the first [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration; Nosek remains a partner and sits on the SpaceX board.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The firm operates with a smaller headcount than its peers and has historically kept a flat partner structure. [[Brian Singerman]], [[Trae Stephens]], [[Keith Rabois]], and [[Delian Asparouhov]] have been among the partners whose deals extended the firm's reach into defense, health, and frontier-technology investing. The partner network overlaps with the Dialog convening network the same cofounders run: the firm's principals and its portfolio-company founders are the population from which Dialog's technology-side membership is drawn.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Zero to One Thesis
|
||||
|
||||
The firm's investment thesis is set out in the 2014 book *[[Zero to One|Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future]]*, coauthored by Thiel and [[Blake Masters]]. The book argues that competition is for losers and that durable value comes from building monopolies around proprietary technology, and it licenses the firm's preference for capital-intensive, defensibility-focused bets in domains that traditional venture capital had avoided. The thesis rejects the conventional venture preference for consumer-internet distribution deals in favor of bets on firms that can establish structural dominance in a foundational category.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The thesis has produced concentrated bets. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in SpaceX (2008), took an early position in Palantir Technologies alongside the In-Q-Tel seed, led the early rounds of Anduril Industries beginning in 2017, and has built a substantial defense-and-sovereign-infrastructure portfolio across Clearview AI, Anduril, and adjacent firms. The defense-tech concentration is the commercial counterpart to the [[Neoreaction]] thesis that state capacity should be privatized and concentrated in private firms.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Notable Investments and Returns
|
||||
|
||||
The Facebook investment is the firm's best-known outcome. Thiel's 2004 angel investment of 500,000 dollars acquired approximately 10 percent of the company; the firm and Thiel sold the majority of the position across the 2012 IPO and the following years, with the realized return in the range of two billion dollars. The SpaceX position, held since 2008, remains the firm's largest unrealized holding as the company's valuation has risen through successive private rounds. Palantir Technologies, Airbnb, and Stripe each produced billion-dollar-plus outcomes.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The defense and frontier-tech portfolio is the more recent concentration. Anduril Industries, backed by Founders Fund from 2017 and led by partner Stephens, reached a 30.5 billion dollar valuation in the 2025 Series G that Founders Fund led with a reported one billion dollar check. Clearview AI, the facial-recognition firm, took Thiel-network investment. The firm has also built positions in [[Epic Games]], [[Affirm]], and in [[bitcoin]] (the firm took an early institutional position and disclosed holdings in 2020).[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Defense-Tech and Sovereign-Infrastructure Concentration
|
||||
|
||||
Founders Fund's portfolio has shifted toward defense, sovereign-grade infrastructure, and firms whose products are procured by or substitute for state functions. The concentration includes Palantir Technologies (intelligence and law-enforcement data fusion), Anduril Industries (autonomous defense systems), Clearview AI (facial recognition), and adjacent positions in surveillance, identity, and payments infrastructure. The firm's published investment theses, including the 2014 [[Founders Fund Manifesto]] that criticized the consumer-internet focus of the prior venture generation, frame the shift as a return to the "atoms not bits" argument that capital should flow into physical and infrastructure technology rather than into consumer software.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The portfolio concentration aligns the firm's commercial interests with the [[Dialog]] convening network's government-side membership. Portfolio companies in defense, data fusion, and surveillance categories sell to the intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies whose congressional oversight and military-command principals attend Dialog. The firm is the investment vehicle; Dialog is the convening vehicle; the portfolio's clients are the government principals who appear on the Dialog roster.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: For Founders Fund's portfolio, partners, and investment history, see the firm's own published materials at foundersfund.com and the corporate filings of its portfolio companies.
|
||||
[^2]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. The "competition is for losers" formulation and the monopoly thesis are set out in Chapter 3.
|
||||
[^3]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
|
||||
[^4]: "Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund." *NBC New York* (via Bloomberg), 2025. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/anduril-raises-funding-at-30-5-billion-valuation-in-round-led-by-founders-fund-chairman-says/6291304/
|
||||
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Humanity Institute.md
Normal file
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Humanity Institute.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- FutureOfHumanityInstitute
|
||||
- Longtermism
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- Transhumanism
|
||||
- Oxford
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- FHI
|
||||
summary: "The Future of Humanity Institute was a research center at the University of Oxford founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom that became the academic headquarters of longtermism and AI-existential-risk research, drew funding from Elon Musk and the FTX Future Fund, and was closed by the university in April 2024."
|
||||
location: "Oxford, England"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was a multidisciplinary research center at the [[University of Oxford]], founded in 2005 by the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] and closed by the university on April 16, 2024. For nearly two decades it was the academic headquarters of [[Longtermism|longtermism]] and of the study of existential risk, the danger of events that would permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential. Its personnel and arguments seeded the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and its work on artificial-intelligence risk reinforced the doom thesis that runs through the [[Rationalist Community]] and the AI-safety organizations [[Peter Thiel]] funded.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Research and Personnel
|
||||
|
||||
FHI sat within Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School and worked on existential risk, AI safety, human enhancement, global catastrophic risk, and the anthropic reasoning Bostrom had formalized. Its researchers overlapped almost entirely with the founding figures of effective altruism: [[Toby Ord]], who founded [[Giving What We Can]], and [[William MacAskill]], who later wrote the longtermist book *What We Owe the Future*, were associated with the institute and the adjacent Oxford effective-altruism organizations, and the futurist [[Anders Sandberg]] was a long-serving senior fellow. The institute functioned as the scholarly counterpart to the Bay Area rationalist scene around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]].[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The institute was established in 2005 on a three-year initial term and ran for nineteen years. Its output included Bostrom's *Superintelligence* and the formalization of "existential risk," Ord's 2020 book *The Precipice*, and influential papers on the "unilateralist's curse," the "vulnerable world hypothesis," and the simulation argument, alongside early technical AI-governance work that fed the policy conversation later taken up by the [[Future of Life Institute]] and government bodies. The historian of the milieu noted that FHI operated less as a conventional department than as a research collective of philosophers, mathematicians, and computer scientists working on questions most academic institutions regarded as speculative.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding
|
||||
|
||||
FHI drew support from technology philanthropy aligned with its longtermist mission. [[Elon Musk]], whom Bostrom's *Superintelligence* had influenced, funded AI-safety work in the institute's orbit, and the institute and its affiliated projects received money from [[Open Philanthropy]] and, before its 2022 collapse, the [[FTX Future Fund]] established by [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]. The funding tied Oxford academic longtermism to the same donor base that capitalized the effective-altruism and AI-safety infrastructure.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The reliance on a small number of mission-aligned donors became a structural problem once Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy froze the institute's fundraising in 2020, leaving it unable to bring in new money or replace departing staff. The collapse of the FTX Future Fund in November 2022, when Bankman-Fried's exchange failed and the fund's grant commitments evaporated, cut off a major prospective source for longtermist research across the field and deepened the reputational crisis that surrounded the institute in its final eighteen months. The institute's dependence on the effective-altruism donor base meant its fortunes tracked that movement's standing rather than ordinary university funding cycles.[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Closure
|
||||
|
||||
The institute shut down on April 16, 2024, after years of administrative conflict with the Oxford philosophy faculty, including a freeze on hiring and fundraising. Bostrom left the university. The closure followed the reputational damage of Bostrom's 2023 admission of a 1990s racist email and the wider discrediting of effective altruism after the [[FTX]] fraud, and it removed longtermism's principal academic institution at the moment the movement was under its heaviest public scrutiny.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The institute's website was replaced on the closure date by a four-paragraph statement attributing the shutdown to "increasing administrative headwinds" from the Faculty of Philosophy. The Faculty had decided in late 2023 not to renew the contracts of the remaining staff, and Bostrom described the outcome to *The Guardian* as a "death by bureaucracy." Bostrom founded a successor organization, the nonprofit Macrostrategy Research Initiative, to continue the work outside Oxford. Several former staff dispersed to other existential-risk bodies, including the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]] at Cambridge and independent AI-governance groups, but no institution replaced FHI's role as the field's academic center.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014, and the Future of Humanity Institute research record, 2005 to 2024.
|
||||
[^2]: "Why longtermism is the world's most dangerous secular credo," *Aeon,* 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
|
||||
[^3]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century," *Jacobin,* January 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism
|
||||
[^4]: "Effective Altruism After Sam Bankman-Fried," Seven Pillars Institute, 2023. https://www.sevenpillarsinstitute.org/effective-altruism-after-sam-bankman-fried/
|
||||
[^5]: "The future of the future of humanity," Émile P. Torres, on the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute, 2024. https://xriskology.substack.com/p/the-future-of-the-future-of-humanity
|
||||
[^6]: "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the institute's 2005 founding, nineteen-year run, research output, the 2020 fundraising and hiring freeze, the late-2023 contract decision, the April 16, 2024 closure statement, and the "death by bureaucracy" account; Bostrom subsequently founded the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/looking-back-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute
|
||||
48
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Life Institute.md
Normal file
48
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Life Institute.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- FutureOfLifeInstitute
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- ExistentialRisk
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- ElonMusk
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- FLI
|
||||
summary: "The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit founded in 2014 by Max Tegmark and others to address existential risks from advanced technology, funded with an early ten million dollar gift from Elon Musk, that published the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments."
|
||||
location: "Cambridge, Massachusetts"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization founded in March 2014 by the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]] physicist [[Max Tegmark]], the Estonian programmer [[Jaan Tallinn]], and the researchers [[Viktoriya Krakovna]], [[Anthony Aguirre]], and [[Meia Chita-Tegmark]], to steer transformative technologies away from large-scale risks to humanity. It is one of the principal organizations of the artificial-intelligence existential-risk movement, alongside the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], and it shares the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermist]] donor base and worldview.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Musk Funding and Early Work
|
||||
|
||||
[[Elon Musk]], who had been influenced by [[Nick Bostrom]]'s warnings about superintelligence, donated ten million dollars to the institute in January 2015, money that funded about seven million dollars in research grants on AI safety. The institute's first conference, held in [[Puerto Rico]] from January 2 to 5, 2015, gathered AI researchers with economists, lawyers, and ethicists to set priorities for "robust and beneficial" AI; in July 2015 FLI announced grants of nearly seven million dollars to 37 research teams from the Musk gift. The January 2017 Asilomar conference produced the 23 "Asilomar AI Principles" on research goals, ethics, and longer-term risks, an early and widely cited governance framework.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Tallinn, a cofounder of [[Skype]] and a major funder of the rationalist and AI-risk ecosystem, sits among its backers. In May 2021 the Ethereum cofounder [[Vitalik Buterin]] gave the institute a cryptocurrency donation later disclosed in an EU transparency filing as worth roughly 665 million dollars, much of it in Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens; the institute cashed out about 500 million dollars, far more than Buterin said he had expected given the token's liquidity. Buterin subsequently distanced himself from FLI, saying its later turn toward "cultural and political action" risked authoritarian outcomes and could be used to restrict open-source AI.[^3][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2023 Pause Letter
|
||||
|
||||
In March 2023 the institute published "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter," calling on all AI labs to halt for at least six months the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing risks of AI-generated propaganda, mass job automation, human obsolescence, and a loss of societal control. The letter gathered more than thirty thousand signatures, including Musk, the Apple cofounder [[Steve Wozniak]], the historian [[Yuval Noah Harari]], and the AI researchers [[Yoshua Bengio]] and [[Stuart Russell]]. No pause occurred; the AI companies instead expanded their training infrastructure, and the letter became the most prominent public expression of the AI-doom position associated with [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] and the longtermist movement.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Yudkowsky himself declined to sign and published his "Shut it all down" essay in *Time* days later arguing the letter asked for far too little. The early signatory list also drew scrutiny when several names were revealed to be impersonations the institute had not verified, including fake signatures attributed to [[Sam Altman]], Meta chief AI scientist [[Yann LeCun]], and Chinese president [[Xi Jinping]], which FLI removed after tightening its vetting; critics also noted that some genuine signatories led companies positioned to benefit from a pause that slowed competitors. The letter nonetheless shaped the 2023 policy debate, feeding into the United Kingdom's November 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and the wider governmental turn toward frontier-AI oversight.[^4][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Nya Dagbladet Grant Controversy
|
||||
|
||||
In January 2023 the Swedish anti-racist foundation [[Expo (foundation)|Expo]] reported that FLI, through Tegmark, had offered a 100,000 dollar grant to the foundation behind Nya Dagbladet, a Swedish outlet that had published far-right and racist conspiracy content. Tegmark's brother had connections to the Swedish alternative-media scene, which drew further attention to the episode.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
FLI said it had offered the grant before completing due diligence, became aware of the outlet's "right-wing extremist" affiliations during that process roughly three months later, and immediately revoked the offer, and it stated that the foundation had received no funding and would receive none. The institute published a statement on the rejected proposal in response to the reporting. The controversy sharpened existing concerns about the opacity of FLI's grantmaking and the politics of its expanding cryptocurrency-funded budget.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "New International Grants Program Jump-Starts Research to Ensure AI Remains Beneficial," Future of Life Institute, 2015, on the founding and the grants program. https://futureoflife.org/ai/2015selection/
|
||||
[^2]: "How Elon Musk is trying to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humanity," *Malay Mail* / Associated Press, July 2, 2015, on the ten million dollar Musk donation. https://www.malaymail.com/news/tech/gadgets/2015/07/02/how-elon-musk-is-trying-to-make-sure-ai-doesnt-wipe-out-humanity/925841
|
||||
[^3]: "Elon Musk-Backed Non-Profit Offered $100K Grant to 'Pro-Nazi' Media Outlet," *Vice,* on the institute's funding and a later grant controversy. https://www.vice.com/en/article/future-of-life-institute-max-tegmark-elon-musk/
|
||||
[^4]: Future of Life Institute. "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter," March 2023. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
|
||||
[^5]: "FAQs about FLI's Open Letter Calling for a Pause on Giant AI Experiments," Future of Life Institute, 2023, and the one-year-later assessment. https://futureoflife.org/ai/faqs-about-flis-open-letter-calling-for-a-pause-on-giant-ai-experiments/
|
||||
[^6]: "New International Grants Program Jump-Starts Research to Ensure AI Remains Beneficial," Future of Life Institute, 2015, on the January 2015 Puerto Rico conference, the July 2015 grants of nearly seven million dollars to 37 teams, and the 2017 Asilomar AI Principles. https://futureoflife.org/ai/2015selection/
|
||||
[^7]: "Future of Life Institute received $665 million in crypto," Philanthropy News Digest, on the May 2021 Vitalik Buterin SHIB donation disclosed in a 2023 EU filing, and "Vitalik Buterin questions political pivot by AI safety group that cashed out roughly $500M from his SHIB donation," *The Block.* https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/future-of-life-institute-received-undisclosed-665-million-in-crypto
|
||||
[^8]: "Elon Musk-Backed Non-Profit Offered $100K Grant to 'Pro-Nazi' Media Outlet," *Vice,* 2023, and "Statement on a controversial rejected grant proposal," Future of Life Institute, 2023, on the offered and revoked Nya Dagbladet grant. https://futureoflife.org/rejection_statement/
|
||||
[^9]: "The Open Letter to Stop 'Dangerous' AI Race Is a Huge Mess," *Vice,* 2023, on the fake signatures attributed to Sam Altman, Yann LeCun, and Xi Jinping and the institute's tightened vetting. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-open-letter-to-stop-dangerous-ai-race-is-a-huge-mess/
|
||||
47
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/GiveWell.md
Normal file
47
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/GiveWell.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- GiveWell
|
||||
- HoldenKarnofsky
|
||||
- ElieHassenfeld
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- BridgewaterAssociates
|
||||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- The Clear Fund
|
||||
summary: "GiveWell is a charity evaluator founded in 2007 by former Bridgewater Associates analysts Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, whose cost-effectiveness rankings of global-health charities and whose GiveWell Labs project, funded by Good Ventures, became Open Philanthropy."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
GiveWell is a nonprofit charity evaluator founded in 2007 by [[Holden Karnofsky]] and [[Elie Hassenfeld]], two former hedge-fund analysts at [[Bridgewater Associates]], that ranks charities by cost-effectiveness and directs donors toward a short list of proven global-health interventions. Its research methodology and its incubated "GiveWell Labs" project, bankrolled by the [[Good Ventures]] foundation of [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and [[Cari Tuna]], produced [[Open Philanthropy]], and GiveWell became one of the foundational institutions of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2007 Founding
|
||||
|
||||
Karnofsky and Hassenfeld met as investment analysts at Bridgewater Associates, the [[Connecticut]] firm run by [[Ray Dalio]] that is the world's largest hedge fund. In 2006 they formed an informal group of eight colleagues to research where they could give charitably with the most measurable impact, applying the data-driven, transparency-oriented analysis they used in finance and finding that charities published little evidence of results. In 2007 Karnofsky and Hassenfeld left their jobs, raised about 300,000 dollars in startup funds from former coworkers, and incorporated the organization, originally called The Clear Fund, publishing their first business plan, "The Case for the Clear Fund," on April 7, 2007.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The new organization's defining premise was that information about how to help people should never be secret and that cost-effectiveness, the dollars required to achieve a given amount of good, should be published openly so that ordinary donors could direct their money toward the most effective programs. GiveWell tracked just over 30,000 dollars in donations to its recommended charities after its first year, roughly 1 million dollars in 2009, and over 5 million dollars by 2011, growing as it narrowed its focus to a handful of causes where the evidence was strongest.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2007 Marketing Controversy
|
||||
|
||||
In December 2007 GiveWell's credibility was damaged by an online promotion scandal. Karnofsky posted on forums including Ask MetaFilter, Lifehacker, and Wall Street Journal comment sections under fabricated identities such as "geremiah," "Holden0," and "Research24," in some cases posing a question about how to choose a charity and then answering it himself with links to GiveWell. He also sent emails to bloggers impersonating a GiveWell staffer. Hassenfeld posted comments on Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and other sites, including under the alias "Talia," without disclosing his affiliation.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
When the conduct was exposed by users on MetaFilter, GiveWell's board investigated and issued reprimands and penalties. Karnofsky was removed from his position as executive director in early January 2008 and the board imposed a financial penalty, cutting 5,000 dollars from his compensation and requiring him to take a professional-development course; he apologized for what he called a horrible lapse of judgement. Karnofsky was subsequently reinstated to a leadership role, and he and Hassenfeld remained at the head of the organization, with Hassenfeld continuing as chief executive into the 2020s.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy
|
||||
|
||||
In 2011 the foundation Good Ventures, newly created by Moskovitz and Tuna, made its first grant of 50,000 dollars to GiveWell and gave a further 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities, and Tuna joined GiveWell's board. In 2012 GiveWell moved its small staff from New York to San Francisco to be nearer Tuna and other technology donors, and the two organizations launched a joint research project called GiveWell Labs to look for high-impact giving opportunities beyond direct-aid charities. GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and spun off as a separate organization in June 2017, taking on the larger and riskier giving (including AI-safety and pandemic work) while GiveWell kept its focus on measurable global-health charities.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
GiveWell's published top charities have centered on a recurring set of interventions: the [[Against Malaria Foundation]] for insecticide-treated bed nets, [[Malaria Consortium]] for seasonal malaria chemoprevention, Helen Keller International for vitamin-A supplementation, New Incentives for vaccination incentives in Nigeria, and GiveDirectly for unconditional cash transfers. Money moved through GiveWell rose from about 27.8 million dollars in 2014 to 110.1 million in 2015 and to roughly 152 million by 2019, with Good Ventures grants accounting for a large share of those totals, and in 2025 GiveWell directed about 31 million dollars to charities hit by the freeze in USAID funding. Critics, including the Happier Lives Institute in November 2022, have challenged GiveWell's cost-effectiveness models for malaria prevention, deworming, and cash transfers.[^4][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on Karnofsky and Hassenfeld's Bridgewater Associates background, the 2011 Good Ventures partnership, GiveWell Labs, and the August 2014 and June 2017 transitions to Open Philanthropy. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
|
||||
[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum, on the Good Ventures, GiveWell, and Open Philanthropy structure. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin
|
||||
[^3]: "Our Story," GiveWell, on the 2007 founding, the eight-person finance-industry group, the 300,000-dollar startup funding, and the original Clear Fund name. https://www.givewell.org/about/story
|
||||
[^4]: "Our Progress," GiveWell, on money moved (over 30,000 dollars after year one, roughly 1 million in 2009, over 5 million in 2011, 27.8 million in 2014, 110.1 million in 2015, and about 152 million in 2019). https://www.givewell.org/about/progress
|
||||
[^5]: "Full account of GiveWell staff's inappropriate online promotion in December 2007," GiveWell, on Karnofsky and Hassenfeld's undisclosed forum posting and fabricated identities. https://www.givewell.org/about/official-records/board-meeting-3/FAQ-on-inappropriate-marketing/full-account
|
||||
[^6]: "GiveWell in turmoil after 'horrible lapse of judgement' by founders," *Alliance* magazine, on the board's removal of Karnofsky as executive director, the 5,000-dollar penalty and required course, and his apology and later reinstatement. https://www.alliancemagazine.org/news/givewell-in-turmoil-after-horrible-lapse-of-judgement-by-founders/
|
||||
[^7]: "GiveWell," InfluenceWatch, on the top charities (Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International, New Incentives, Sightsavers), the 2024 financials with Hassenfeld as chief executive, the 31-million-dollar 2025 USAID response, and the Happier Lives Institute critique. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/givewell/
|
||||
47
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Good Ventures.md
Normal file
47
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Good Ventures.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- GoodVentures
|
||||
- DustinMoskovitz
|
||||
- CariTuna
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- OpenPhilanthropy
|
||||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Good Ventures Foundation
|
||||
summary: "Good Ventures is the foundation founded in 2011 by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and the journalist Cari Tuna that, through its partnership with GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, became the dominant funder of the effective-altruism, global-health, and AI-safety grant ecosystem."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Good Ventures is a private philanthropic foundation established in 2011 by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife, the former journalist [[Cari Tuna]]. Its partnership with the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]] produced [[Open Philanthropy]] (renamed Coefficient Giving in November 2025), and the foundation supplies nearly all of that organization's grant money, making the Moskovitz and Tuna fortune the dominant and most durable financial source behind the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, evidence-based global health and development, and AI-safety research.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2011 Founding
|
||||
|
||||
Moskovitz, who retained roughly two percent of Facebook at its 2012 public offering and built a second fortune at the workplace-software company Asana, and Tuna, who had been a reporter at the *Wall Street Journal*, created Good Ventures in 2011 as the vehicle for giving away the bulk of their wealth. They were among the youngest signatories of the [[Giving Pledge]], the Bill Gates and [[Warren Buffett]] commitment to donate the majority of one's fortune, signing in 2014 in their late twenties and early thirties. Tuna served as president of the foundation and became the public face of the operation, articulating a "give where it does the most good" framework that delegated cause selection to a professional research staff applying cost-effectiveness analysis rather than to the donors' personal sentiment.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Almost immediately the new foundation oriented itself around GiveWell, the charity evaluator that [[Holden Karnofsky]] and [[Elie Hassenfeld]] had founded in 2007 after working as investment analysts at [[Bridgewater Associates]], the world's largest hedge fund. Good Ventures made its first grant, of 50,000 dollars, to GiveWell itself in 2011, and in the same year directed a further 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities. Tuna joined GiveWell's board in 2011, formalizing the relationship. In 2012 GiveWell relocated its office and five-person staff from New York to San Francisco to be closer to Tuna and other technology donors, and Good Ventures and GiveWell announced a close partnership that June.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy
|
||||
|
||||
The partnership produced a joint research project called GiveWell Labs, launched in 2012 to look for giving opportunities beyond the direct-aid global-health charities that GiveWell already recommended. GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and was spun off from GiveWell as a separate organization in June 2017, though the two retained overlapping boards and staff and shared office space in downtown San Francisco. The split divided two functions: GiveWell continued recommending a short list of proven, measurable charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, and harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale made possible, including pandemic preparedness, farm-animal welfare, scientific research, and the prevention of catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence both organizations have acknowledged. The longtermist and AI-risk portion of that giving flowed to the research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to [[OpenAI]] in 2017 that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, and later became an early investor in the AI company [[Anthropic]]. Karnofsky, who served as co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, is married to Anthropic president [[Daniela Amodei]]. The [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] briefly funded the same longtermist and AI-safety field in 2022 before evaporating when FTX collapsed that November.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Dominant Funder
|
||||
|
||||
By the mid-2010s Good Ventures had become by far the largest single donor channeling money through GiveWell, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the estimated 375 million dollars GiveWell had moved to its favored organizations, with annual Good Ventures grants of 70.4 million dollars in 2015, 50.4 million in 2016, and 75.1 million in 2017. As of August 2022 the foundation reported having granted more than 1.7 billion dollars across global health and development, farmed-animal welfare, global catastrophic risks, and other cause areas. By 2025 Moskovitz and Tuna had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative giving since 2011, including more than 600 million dollars in 2025 alone, with Good Ventures making 493 grants in 2024 at a median grant size of about 115,000 dollars.[^1][^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The concentration of so much AI-safety and effective-altruism funding under a single foundation drew sustained criticism. Because Good Ventures funds much of the research community that examines the AI labs, and because Open Philanthropy was an early investor in Anthropic, observers argued that the field scrutinizing the AI companies depended financially on one donor couple who were also early backers of one of those companies. When Open Philanthropy rebranded as Coefficient Giving in November 2025 and began running multi-donor funds that other philanthropists could join, Good Ventures remained its founding and most significant ongoing partner and the source of the bulk of its capital.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on the 2011 founding of Good Ventures, the first 50,000-dollar grant to GiveWell, the additional 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities in 2011, Tuna joining the GiveWell board, the 2012 San Francisco relocation, GiveWell Labs, and the 60-percent share of GiveWell's 375 million dollars moved. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
|
||||
[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum, on Good Ventures as the primary funder of Open Philanthropy. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin
|
||||
[^3]: "Cari Tuna," EA Forum topic entry on Good Ventures and the Giving Pledge. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/cari-tuna
|
||||
[^4]: "Our Progress," GiveWell, on GiveWell Labs launching in 2012, its August 2014 rename to the Open Philanthropy Project, and the June 2017 spin-off; annual Good Ventures grant totals of 70.4 million dollars (2015), 50.4 million (2016), and 75.1 million (2017). https://www.givewell.org/about/progress
|
||||
[^5]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder, the 2017 OpenAI grant and board seat, and the Karnofsky-Amodei marriage. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6
|
||||
[^6]: "Moskovitz & Tuna: $600M Donated in 2025, Over $4B Total Since 2011," IndexBox, on the 4-billion-dollar cumulative total, the 600 million in 2025, and the 493 grants in 2024 at a 115,000-dollar median. https://www.indexbox.io/blog/dustin-moskovitz-cari-tunas-4b-philanthropy-journey/
|
||||
[^7]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025, on the rename and the multi-donor expansion with Good Ventures as the founding partner. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/
|
||||
55
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Hereticon.md
Normal file
55
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Hereticon.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Hereticon
|
||||
- FoundersFund
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- MikeSolana
|
||||
- PirateWires
|
||||
- Heterodoxy
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Hereticon Conference
|
||||
summary: "Hereticon is an invitation-only conference organized by Founders Fund executive Mike Solana, announced in October 2019 and first held January 10 to 13, 2022, self-described as 'a conference for thoughtcrime,' whose programming spans immortality research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, and ideological heterodoxy."
|
||||
location: "United States (rotating sites)"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Hereticon is an invitation-only conference organized by [[Mike Solana]], a partner and the chief marketing officer of [[Founders Fund]], self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime." The conference was announced in October 2019 and held its inaugural event January 10 through 13, 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programming spans immortality and life-extension research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, the ethics of defense technology, and ideological heterodoxy on questions the mainstream press is treated as having closed. Founders Fund, the [[Peter Thiel]] venture firm, bankrolls the conference.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Solana Organizing Role
|
||||
|
||||
Founders Fund announced Hereticon in October 2019 through a launch that framed the conference as a venue for ideas excluded from mainstream forums. The *Business Insider* and [[Gizmodo]] coverage of the announcement described the planned program as including sessions on immortality, UFOs, and doomsday prepping. The inaugural event was delayed by the pandemic and held January 10 through 13, 2022, at a site kept private to facilitate what Solana described as a spirit of openness among attendees.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Mike Solana is the conference's organizer and the public face of the project. Solana is a longtime Founders Fund executive who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years and is the founder and editor-in-chief of [[Pirate Wires]], the Substack-based media outlet that covers the intersection of technology and politics from the Thiel-network perspective. *The Atlantic* profiled Solana in October 2024 as a "Peter Thiel protege" whose Pirate Wires newsletter had become required reading in what the magazine called the anti-woke investor class. Solana's role at Hereticon places a single individual in control of the conference's programming, the Founders Fund media arm (Pirate Wires), and a senior position at the venture firm itself.[^3][^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Programming and the Thoughtcrime Frame
|
||||
|
||||
The conference tagline, "a conference for thoughtcrime," is drawn from the George Orwell *1984* concept and signals the programming posture: topics are selected on the basis that the mainstream institutional consensus has declared them closed, disreputable, or beyond discussion. The *Reason* magazine interview with Solana in May 2022 covered the framing in detail, with Solana arguing that deplatforming and tribalism had narrowed the range of ideas the mainstream press would entertain and that tech figures and journalists had become "natural enemies" over the question of who controls the boundary of acceptable discourse.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The documented programming includes sessions on life-extension and immortality research (a long-running Thiel interest), UFO claims (including promoters of the extraterrestrial-hypothesis framing), doomsday prepping and civilizational risk, the ethics of defense technology development, and revisitations of Thiel's own 1995 essay *The Diversity Myth* on its thirtieth anniversary. The Founders Fund podcast *Anatomy of Next* has published Hereticon sessions including one titled "Apocalypse Ball" by Solana and a session with Thiel on *The Diversity Myth*. The UFO and life-extension programming overlaps with the broader Thiel-network interest in topics that sit at the edge of mainstream institutional credibility.[^3][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Startups-as-Cults Frame
|
||||
|
||||
The conference's heterodoxy programming sits within a documented Thiel-network treatment of cult dynamics as an organizing model. In *[[Zero to One]]* (2014), Thiel and [[Blake Masters]] write that "the best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults," distinguishing a successful startup from a cult only in that the startup is "fanatically right about something those outside it have missed." The Dialog society, the wider Thiel convening vehicle, placed a session on "cult-building" on its 2026 retreat agenda alongside sessions on artificial intelligence, sexuality, and preparation for war.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Hereticon's immortality, life-extension, and artificial-intelligence programming overlaps with the transhumanist and artificial-intelligence-risk concerns of the [[Rationalist Community]], the Bay Area subculture Thiel funded from 2005 through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Singularity Summit]]. That subculture produced its own formations described as cults, including [[Leverage Research]] and the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group, and supplied part of the heterodox-intellectual population from which conferences of this kind draw.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Founders Fund Portfolio Overlap
|
||||
|
||||
The conference audience and speaker roster overlap with the Founders Fund portfolio and with the broader Thiel convening network. Founders Fund portfolio companies, the [[Dialog]] conference's technology-side membership, and the [[PayPal Mafia]] network all supply the population from which Hereticon's invitation list is drawn. The conference is private, with no published attendee list and no press access, which places it structurally closer to the Dialog format than to an open industry conference.[^1][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
Dialog, founded in 2006, convenes a wide invitation list across U.S. partisan politics, the technology industry, finance, and the military. Hereticon, founded in 2019, convenes a narrower list oriented to ideological heterodoxy and to the Founders Fund portfolio. The two share the Founders Fund financial base and the Thiel reputational base, and the smaller conference is more selective than the larger one.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Peter Thiel's VC Firm Founders Fund Announces Hereticon." *Business Insider,* October 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-vc-firm-founders-fund-hereticon-conference-immortality-ufo-2019-10
|
||||
[^2]: "Peter Thiel's VC Fund to Host Conference for Ideological 'Heretics.'" *Gizmodo,* 2019. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiels-vc-fund-to-host-conference-for-ideological-1838685821
|
||||
[^3]: Founders Fund. "Anatomy of Next" podcast, Hereticon episodes. https://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/
|
||||
[^4]: "Mike Solana Wants You To Commit Thoughtcrimes." *Reason,* May 15, 2022. https://reason.com/2022/05/15/mike-solana-wants-you-to-commit-thoughtcrimes/
|
||||
[^5]: "The Most Opinionated Man in America." *The Atlantic,* October 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/mike-solana-pirate-wires/680355/
|
||||
[^6]: "I Attended Hereticon." *Minding the Campus,* November 13, 2024. https://mindingthecampus.org/2024/11/13/i-attended-hereticon/
|
||||
[^7]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
|
||||
[^8]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014.
|
||||
[^9]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel funding the Singularity Institute from 2005 and cofounding the 2006 Singularity Summit.
|
||||
49
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/JPMorgan Chase.md
Normal file
49
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/JPMorgan Chase.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- JeffreyEpstein
|
||||
- JPMorgan
|
||||
- Banking
|
||||
- MoneyLaundering
|
||||
- PrivateBanking
|
||||
- SexTrafficking
|
||||
- JesStaley
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- JPMorgan
|
||||
- J.P. Morgan
|
||||
- JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A.
|
||||
summary: "Largest U.S. bank, which kept Jeffrey Epstein as a private-banking client from 1998 to 2013 despite internal compliance warnings and later paid 290 million dollars to his victims and 75 million dollars to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle sex-trafficking-facilitation claims."
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the largest bank in the United States by assets, headquartered in [[New York City]] and led since 2006 by chief executive [[Jamie Dimon]]. From 1998 to 2013 it maintained [[Jeffrey Epstein]] as a private-banking and wealth-management client across the period during which Epstein was arrested, pleaded guilty to a Florida prostitution charge, and registered as a sex offender. In 2023 the bank settled two lawsuits in the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of New York]] before [[Jed Rakoff]], paying 290 million dollars to a class of Epstein's victims and 75 million dollars to the [[Government of the United States Virgin Islands]], and it filed a third-party claim seeking to shift liability to its former executive [[Jes Staley]].[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Epstein Banking Relationship
|
||||
|
||||
Epstein became a client of JPMorgan's private bank in 1998, and the relationship was managed by Staley, who led [[JPMorgan Asset Management]] and later the investment bank.[^1] The bank retained Epstein through his 2006 arrest in [[Palm Beach, Florida]], his 2008 guilty plea to soliciting a minor for prostitution, and his registration as a sex offender, generating fees and using Epstein as a referral source for wealthy prospective clients.[^1] [[Mary Erdoes]], who ran the bank's asset and wealth management division, was identified in victims' filings as a defender of keeping Epstein as a client.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
In a July 2011 email, JPMorgan general counsel [[Stephen Cutler]] told Erdoes and Staley that Epstein was "not an honorable person in any way" and "should not be a client," and Cutler later testified under oath that Staley and Erdoes made the decision to retain him.[^4] Plaintiffs alleged that the bank processed payments consistent with the trafficking operation, including cash withdrawals and transfers to women and to alleged co-conspirators, and that JPMorgan underreported suspicious activity to authorities.[^4] A deposition indicated that Dimon said he was not aware of a 2011 internal warning about Epstein.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
JPMorgan exited the Epstein relationship in 2013, the same year Staley left the bank for [[BlueMountain Capital]].[^4] Epstein then moved his accounts to [[Deutsche Bank]], which banked him from 2013 until 2018.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2023 Litigation Before Judge Rakoff
|
||||
|
||||
Two suits proceeded against JPMorgan in the Southern District of New York before Judge Rakoff. One was brought by a survivor identified as Jane Doe 1 on behalf of a class of women abused by Epstein, alleging the bank knowingly benefited from and facilitated his sex trafficking.[^2] The other was brought by the Government of the United States Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned [[Little Saint James]], alleging the bank ignored red flags about his conduct on the island.[^3] Both suits asserted that JPMorgan kept Epstein despite documented internal concern and processed transactions that supported the abuse.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
On March 9, 2023 JPMorgan filed a third-party complaint against Staley within the Virgin Islands action, asserting indemnification, contribution, breach of fiduciary duty, and "faithless servant" claims and seeking to recover compensation paid to him from at least 2006 through 2013.[^7] The complaint alleged Staley had concealed his personal activities with Epstein and misrepresented Epstein's character to the bank.[^7] Staley moved to dismiss, contending the bank was using him as a "shield" for its own failures.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
In June 2023 JPMorgan agreed to pay 290 million dollars to resolve the survivors' class claims, and in September 2023 it agreed to pay 75 million dollars to settle the Virgin Islands suit.[^2][^3] The bank did not admit wrongdoing in either settlement.[^3] The Virgin Islands settlement allocated 30 million dollars to charitable organizations, 25 million dollars to strengthen anti-trafficking law enforcement, and 20 million dollars to attorneys' fees.[^3] Judge Rakoff granted final approval of the 290 million dollar class settlement at a hearing in November 2023.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
[^1]: "JPMorgan kept Epstein as client for years after warnings, deposition shows," *The Washington Post,* 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/epstein-jpmorgan-client-sex-offender-warnings/
|
||||
[^2]: "JPMorgan Chase and Epstein survivor Jane Doe 1 reach $290 million settlement," *NPR,* 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181675580/epstein-jane-doe-1-290-million-settlement-jpmorgan-chase
|
||||
[^3]: "JPMorgan Chase settles Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking suit by U.S. Virgin Islands for $75 million," *CNBC,* 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/jpmorgan-to-settle-jeffrey-epstein-suit-by-virgin-islands.html
|
||||
[^4]: "JPMorgan kept Epstein as client for years after warnings, deposition shows," *The Washington Post,* 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/epstein-jpmorgan-client-sex-offender-warnings/
|
||||
[^5]: "JPMorgan's Dimon not aware of 2011 warning about Jeffrey Epstein: Deposition," *AOL / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.aol.com/dimon-not-aware-2011-warning-235933765.html
|
||||
[^6]: New York State Department of Financial Services, In the Matter of Deutsche Bank AG, Consent Order Under New York Banking Law sections 39 and 44, July 6, 2020. https://www.dfs.ny.gov/industry_guidance/enforcement_discipline/ea20200706_deutsche_bank
|
||||
[^7]: "JPMorgan Sues Ex-Executive Associated With Jeffrey Epstein," *Time,* 2023. https://time.com/6261243/jpmorgan-lawsuit-jes-staley-epstein-trafficking/
|
||||
[^8]: "Jes Staley Says JPMorgan Using Him as 'Shield' for Epstein Failures," *U.S. News & World Report / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-04-24/jes-staley-seeks-to-dismiss-jpmorgan-chase-lawsuit-over-jeffrey-epstein
|
||||
[^9]: "JPMorgan's $290 million settlement with Epstein accusers wins approval by U.S. judge," *CNBC / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/jpmorgans-290-million-settlement-with-epstein-accusers-wins-approval-by-us-judge.html
|
||||
56
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Leverage Research.md
Normal file
56
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Leverage Research.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- LeverageResearch
|
||||
- Rationalism
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- Cult
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- PsychologicalControl
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Leverage
|
||||
- Paradigm Academy
|
||||
summary: "Leverage Research is a Bay Area organization run from 2011 to 2019 by the philosopher Geoff Anders that recruited from the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu to pursue a 'one true theory of psychology' through intensive group experimentation, and that former members later described as a coercive, cult-like environment."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco Bay Area; New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Leverage Research is an organization founded in 2011 by the philosopher [[Geoff Anders]] that operated until a 2019 restructuring, recruiting from the [[Rationalist Community]] and the [[Effective Altruism]] movement to pursue what Anders called the "one true theory of psychology" and a program to remake its members into world-altering "super-people." Former members, most prominently [[Zoe Curzi]], later published detailed accounts describing the group as practicing coercive psychological control, and it became one of several cult formations to emerge from the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] social network in [[Berkeley]] and [[California]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Connection Theory and the Research Program
|
||||
|
||||
Anders's central construct was "Connection Theory," which he presented as a comprehensive and predictive account of the human mind. Leverage members lived and worked together and submitted to long sessions of "debugging" and "charting," confrontational psychological exercises lasting two to six hours that were aimed at correcting a person's beliefs and psyche so they could become, in Curzi's account, "a sort of Musk-level super-person." Members reported a culture in which Anders was held to be possibly "the only mind who has ever existed who is capable of saving the world" and Connection Theory "the One True Theory of Psychology."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The organization also did political and social "mapping" work, attempting to chart networks of influence as part of a long-range plan to take and reshape institutional power. It operated under several names and affiliated entities, including Paradigm Academy and the Leverage 2.0 research operation that succeeded the original group after 2019.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Effective Altruism and Funding
|
||||
|
||||
Leverage was embedded in the early effective-altruism infrastructure: the organization ran the Effective Altruism Summit in 2013 and the EA Global precursor events, placing Anders's group at an organizing center of the movement during its formative years. Leverage invited [[Center for Applied Rationality|CFAR]] to deliver a version of its workshop at the 2013 summit, knitting the two organizations together at the movement's founding. Its funding came through the rationalist, effective-altruism, and cryptocurrency worlds rather than from a single institutional donor.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The organization operated near Lake Merritt in [[Oakland]], where roughly half the members lived in a Leverage-run building and signed confidentiality agreements restricting what they could say publicly about the work. It ran a 2016 summer program, the Pareto Fellowship, with about twenty participants, which functioned as a recruiting funnel from the broader rationalist and EA scenes into the resident research community. New members were particularly encouraged to move into the shared building, concentrating the group's social and working life in one location.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The documented link to [[Peter Thiel]] runs through the cryptocurrency startup [[Reserve]], co-founded by Nevin Freeman, an early Leverage employee and a co-founder of Paradigm Academy, alongside Miguel Morel, with the stated aim of generating money for non-profit causes including Leverage. Anders advised Reserve and stood to benefit financially if it succeeded, and the venture initially recruited, by one Leverage-side account, "basically a hundred percent" from Leverage Research and Paradigm Academy members. The connection places the Thiel commercial network one funding hop from the Leverage organization, through a crypto venture seeded by Leverage-adjacent founders.[^4][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Reserve raised about five million dollars in a 2018 round that drew in forty-three funds and angel investors, with [[Coinbase]] Ventures, [[Sam Altman]], and Thiel among the named backers of the dollar-pegged stablecoin. Freeman framed the project in expansive terms, saying he wanted to "create a currency that would outlast empires rising and falling" and to be "one of the people who has a boatload of money and is willing to fund things before they're popular." Morel later left to found the blockchain-analytics firm Arkham Intelligence after a brief involvement with Paradigm Academy's methods.[^4][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Cult Allegations and Disclosures
|
||||
|
||||
In October 2021 Curzi published "My Experience with Leverage Research," a first-person account of psychological harm at the organization, which circulated widely on [[LessWrong]] and prompted parallel disclosures about the adjacent MIRI and CFAR environments. Curzi described group debugging sessions, beliefs about demons and "objects" implanted in members' minds, intense secrecy and information control, and the difficulty of leaving. She republished an expanded account in 2024, stating that she believed Leverage had been harmful enough to her and others that the record should be made public.[^1][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Members on the payroll were expected to undergo charting and debugging sessions with a supervisory "trainer" who combined the roles of manager and therapist, and to train others in turn, building a chain of psychological authority through the organization. The practice extended to "bodywork" involving physical contact described variously as massage, energy work, or embodiment technique. Several participants who did extensive charting reported lasting dissociation and a sense of psychic fragmentation that they found difficult to reverse. The culture, in the accounts gathered on LessWrong, treated disagreement with Anders's theories or project strategy as a sign that a member simply was not "there yet," foreclosing dissent as a developmental failing rather than a substantive objection.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The Leverage disclosures, alongside the contemporaneous MIRI and CFAR accounts and the later [[The Zizians|Zizian]] killings, established the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu as the common origin of multiple groups characterized as cults. The [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]] tendency drew from the same recruitment pool.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Curzi, Zoe. "My Experience with Leverage Research," *Medium,* originally published 2021, expanded 2024; first-person disclosure-side account. https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b
|
||||
[^2]: "Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0," LessWrong, 2021. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-about-leverage-research-1-0
|
||||
[^3]: "You Will Not Remember This Essay: On 'Antimemes' and the Failures of Rationalism," *The Metropolitan Review,* on Leverage Research and Connection Theory. https://metropolitanreview.com/you-will-not-remember-this-essay/
|
||||
[^4]: "Arkham Intelligence, Reserve, and the Leverage Research 'cult,'" *Protos,* on the Reserve cryptocurrency project's links to the Leverage ecosystem and its investor roster including Peter Thiel, Coinbase, and Sam Altman. https://protos.com/arkham-intelligence-reserve-and-the-leverage-research-cult/
|
||||
[^5]: "Zoe Curzi's Experience with Leverage Research," LessWrong, October 2021. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPwEptSSFRCnfHqFk/zoe-curzi-s-experience-with-leverage-research
|
||||
[^6]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
|
||||
[^7]: "Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0," LessWrong, 2021; on the Lake Merritt building, confidentiality agreements, the Pareto Fellowship, the trainer/debugging structure, bodywork, and reported dissociation. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-about-leverage-research-1-0
|
||||
[^8]: "Arkham Intelligence, Reserve, and the Leverage Research 'cult,'" *Protos,* on Nevin Freeman's Leverage role, Miguel Morel, Anders's advisory benefit, and Reserve's recruitment from Leverage and Paradigm. https://protos.com/arkham-intelligence-reserve-and-the-leverage-research-cult/
|
||||
[^9]: "Big-name Investors Coinbase and Peter Thiel Back New Stable Token 'Reserve,'" *Coinspeaker,* June 29, 2018; on the roughly five-million-dollar round, the forty-three backers, and the named investors. https://www.coinspeaker.com/2018/06/29/big-name-investors-coinbase-and-peter-thiel-back-new-stable-token-reserve/
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- MIRI
|
||||
- Rationalism
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- Transhumanism
|
||||
- Singularity
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- MIRI
|
||||
- Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
|
||||
- SIAI
|
||||
- Singularity Institute
|
||||
summary: "The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a Berkeley artificial-intelligence-risk nonprofit founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, funded from 2005 by Peter Thiel, that incubated the LessWrong rationalist community and the social network from which the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations later emerged."
|
||||
location: "Berkeley, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is an artificial-intelligence-risk research nonprofit based in [[Berkeley]], [[California]], founded in 2000 by [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] with the internet entrepreneurs [[Brian Atkins]] and [[Sabine Atkins]] under the name the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). The organization argued that a self-improving machine intelligence posed a near-term existential threat to humanity and that the central problem of the era was building such a system so that it would be "friendly" to human values. [[Peter Thiel]] began funding the institute in 2005 and the next year cofounded its public-facing conference, the [[Singularity Summit]], with Yudkowsky and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]]. The institute was renamed MIRI in January 2013.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The institute's blog and discussion community became the organizational seedbed of the [[Rationalist Community]], the [[LessWrong]] subculture, and the overlapping [[Effective Altruism]] movement. The Berkeley social network that formed around the institute and its spin-off the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] was the recruitment pool from which the [[Leverage Research]] organization, the [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]] tendency, and the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] formation drew their members.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Friendly AI Thesis
|
||||
|
||||
Yudkowsky, an autodidact who did not attend high school or college, founded the Singularity Institute in 2000 to work on what he termed "Friendly AI," the problem of aligning a future superintelligent system with human values before it could be built. The Atkinses, who had made money in the early commercial internet, provided the initial funding. The institute's thesis held that the default outcome of building artificial general intelligence was human extinction, and that solving the alignment problem was the most important task facing the species.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The institute's intellectual output ran through Yudkowsky's prolific online writing rather than through peer-reviewed publication. The "Sequences," a multi-year series of blog posts on cognitive bias, Bayesian reasoning, and rationality that Yudkowsky wrote between 2006 and 2009, became the founding text of the rationalist subculture and were later collected as the book *Rationality: From AI to Zombies*.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Thiel Funding and the Singularity Summit
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel began donating to the Singularity Institute in 2005. In 2006 he joined Yudkowsky and Kurzweil to found the Singularity Summit, held that year at [[Stanford University]], which over the following six years grew into a prominent annual gathering for futurists, transhumanists, and AI researchers. Thiel delivered keynote addresses at the summit and became the institute's most prominent early backer; his cumulative donations to the institute were later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars.[^2][^3][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The Thiel funding period (2005 through the early 2010s) coincided with the institute's relocation of its center of gravity to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] and the formation of the in-person rationalist community there. Thiel's interest cooled by the mid-2010s; he later said the people he had funded had shifted "from transhumanism to Luddite," a reversal he made public in 2025 when he named Yudkowsky, alongside the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] and the climate activist [[Greta Thunberg]], as an example of what his lectures called the "Antichrist," a technology-stopping figure he said had become "deranged."[^3][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Rename, CFAR, and the Singularity Brand Sale
|
||||
|
||||
In 2012 the institute spun off the Center for Applied Rationality as a separate Berkeley nonprofit to teach the rationality techniques developed in the community through paid workshops. CFAR had been incubated inside the institute under the working name "Rationality Group" and was formally established on May 8, 2012. Singularity University acquired the Singularity Summit on December 6, 2012, and on January 30, 2013, the institute renamed its research operation the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, narrowing its public mission to technical AI-alignment research.[^2][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The leadership of the organization turned over through the same period. [[Luke Muehlhauser]] had become executive director in November 2011, succeeding Vassar; he resigned on May 6, 2015, to join [[Open Philanthropy]], and [[Nate Soares]] took the post on June 3, 2015, holding it until he moved to the title of president in April 2023, when Yudkowsky became chair of the board. The institute's funding shifted from individual donors toward institutional grants and large cryptocurrency gifts: Open Philanthropy granted 500,000 dollars in August 2016, 3.75 million over three years in October 2017, and 7,703,750 over two years in February 2020, while Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin gave roughly 763,970 dollars in ether in December 2017 and a further 4.4 million in ether in May 2021.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Internal Crises and Adjacent Harm
|
||||
|
||||
The Berkeley community around MIRI and CFAR produced several documented psychological crises and a cluster of organizations later described as cults. A former MIRI researcher, [[Jessica Taylor]], was hospitalized for roughly three weeks in 2017 with delusions she described as feeling "intrinsically evil," an episode she and others connected to the high-intensity "debugging" and world-saving culture of the milieu and to conversations with Michael Vassar, a former president of the institute.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Vassar, who led the Singularity Institute from 2009 to 2011, later built a circle informally called the Vassarites that recruited from the MIRI and CFAR social network and practiced a confrontational psychological method, sometimes combined with psychedelics, aimed at "jailbreaking" members from what Vassar characterized as a corrupt and conformist society. Geoff Anders ran the separate Leverage Research organization out of the same recruitment pool. The Zizians, the formation led by [[Jack LaSota]] that was later tied to six killings across three states, originated as a splinter that attended CFAR programs and protested a CFAR reunion in 2019 before breaking with the community entirely.[^4][^5][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" and the founding of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 2000. See contemporaneous institute records and the timeline maintained at timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute.
|
||||
[^2]: Intelligence.org (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), "Singularity Summit" archive. https://intelligence.org/singularitysummit/
|
||||
[^3]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel beginning to fund Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute in 2005 and cofounding the Singularity Summit in 2006.
|
||||
[^4]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. *Rationality: From AI to Zombies* (collected "Sequences," 2006 through 2009). Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015.
|
||||
[^5]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021, first-person account by a former MIRI researcher; treated as a primary disclosure-side source. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
|
||||
[^6]: "Peter Thiel (Funder)," and reported cumulative donations to the Singularity Institute exceeding 1.6 million dollars. Cross-referenced against the MIRI donation timeline.
|
||||
[^7]: "Peter Thiel Thinks the Antichrist Is 'Someone Like' This AI Doomer That He Funded," *Gizmodo,* October 2025. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-thinks-the-antichrist-is-someone-like-this-ai-doomer-that-he-funded-2000671027
|
||||
[^8]: Foster-Burnett, Sam and others, "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/
|
||||
[^9]: "Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute," Timelines Wiki, on the May 8, 2012 establishment of CFAR (formerly "Rationality Group"), the December 6, 2012 sale of the Singularity Summit to Singularity University, the January 30, 2013 rename to MIRI, the Muehlhauser and Soares executive-director tenures, the April 2023 board reshuffle, and the Open Philanthropy and Vitalik Buterin donation amounts. https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute
|
||||
50
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Mankind Quarterly.md
Normal file
50
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Mankind Quarterly.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- RaceScience
|
||||
- Eugenics
|
||||
- PioneerFund
|
||||
- HumanBiodiversity
|
||||
- AcademicPublishing
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- The Mankind Quarterly
|
||||
- MQ
|
||||
summary: "Mankind Quarterly is a journal founded in 1960-1961 with Pioneer Fund money to publish hereditarian race-and-intelligence research that mainstream journals rejected, widely described as a cornerstone of the scientific-racism establishment."
|
||||
location: "Edinburgh, Scotland"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Mankind Quarterly is an academic journal launched in 1960 and 1961 to publish hereditarian research on race and inheritance that mainstream scientific journals had declined, and over six decades it became the central periodical of organized race science. Its founding was financed in part by [[Wickliffe Draper]] of the [[Pioneer Fund]], it was edited for its first decades by the Scottish anthropologist [[Robert Gayre]], and it later passed to the anthropologist [[Roger Pearson]] and to the psychologist [[Richard Lynn]], whose [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]] now publishes it. Scholars and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] describe it as a white-supremacist outlet and a vehicle for material rejected as pseudoscience.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and Funding
|
||||
|
||||
The journal grew out of opposition to the 1950 [[UNESCO]] statement that rejected race as a meaningful biological category and to the desegregation of the American South. Its founders included Gayre, the geneticist [[Reginald Ruggles Gates]], the segregationist psychologist [[Henry Garrett]], and the Italian statistician [[Corrado Gini]], with the former Nazi geneticist [[Otmar von Verschuer]], who had collaborated with [[Josef Mengele]], among its associated figures. The cost of launching it was met with money from Draper and the Pioneer Fund, the [[New York City|New York]] foundation created in 1937 to promote eugenics and "race betterment." It was published in [[Edinburgh]] by the [[International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics]], a body Draper helped underwrite. Gayre received Pioneer Fund grants annually between 1962 and 1972.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The journal drew immediate condemnation from mainstream anthropology. In 1961 and 1962 the Mexican physical anthropologist [[Juan Comas]] published critiques in *Current Anthropology* and *American Anthropologist* charging that the journal reproduced discredited Nordicist and antisemitic racial ideology under a scientific veneer, and the British journal *[[Nature]]* ran a dismissive notice the same year. Gayre and his associate editors Garrett and Gates responded by filing a libel writ against the Royal Anthropological Institute and the editor of its journal *Man*; the suit ran from 1962 to 1965 before counsel advised the institute to settle. Garrett, who had chaired psychology at [[Columbia University]], openly campaigned against school desegregation through the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Editorial Line and Successors
|
||||
|
||||
Gayre edited the journal until 1978, when Pearson, a British anthropologist who had earlier published openly antisemitic and "Aryan" racial material, took it over and moved its operations to the United States. Lynn, a frequent contributor who became its assistant editor and then editor-in-chief, described the journal as having been established to present "the hereditarian case on race differences and related issues." After 2017 its website was registered to [[Emil Kirkegaard]], who also ran the non-peer-reviewed [[OpenPsych]] paper repository. The Ulster Institute, of which Lynn was president until his death in 2023, publishes it. Its contributors and editorial board overlapped heavily with those of the secret [[London Conference on Intelligence]] held at [[University College London]] between 2014 and 2017.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
From 1979 to 2014 Pearson published the journal through his Washington-based [[Council for Social and Economic Studies]], and in January 2015 publication passed to Lynn's Ulster Institute. The biochemist [[Gerhard Meisenberg]], a Pioneer Fund director who also presented at the London Conference, served as editor-in-chief into the late 2010s; Lynn and Meisenberg coauthored work in its pages, including IQ-by-nation papers drawing on the data later repudiated by the [[European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association]]. Recurrent contributors over the decades included [[Davide Piffer]] and the segregation-era figures who carried the journal from its 1960s founders into the modern human-biodiversity network.[^8][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Scientific Standing
|
||||
|
||||
Mainstream genetics, anthropology, and psychology treat the journal as a fringe publication rather than a credible scientific venue. Critics have called it "a cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment" and "a white supremacist journal," and have characterized it as a place to publish questionable research "under the trappings of objective science" after such work was turned away by reputable outlets. Its claims of innate racial hierarchies in intelligence belong to the same hereditarian literature popularized by [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and circulated through the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] network around [[Steve Sailer]]; mainstream science holds that observed group differences in test scores reflect environmental and social factors rather than genetic ones.[^1][^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The geneticist [[Theodosius Dobzhansky]] described the journal early on as "a true racist periodical, the kind of thing which would gladden the heart of Mr. Goebbels or Mr. Hitler if they could read it." Lynn first published his national-IQ analysis in its pages in 1991, and his body of work accumulated more than 22,000 Google Scholar citations, a reach that researchers calling for retractions in 2024 cited as evidence that the journal's pseudoscience had seeped into the wider literature through later restatement in indexed venues. The journal continued publishing under the Ulster Institute after Lynn's death, carrying a low impact factor and remaining outside the recognized peer-review system.[^2][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism," *Smithsonian Magazine,* May 2018, on the journal's 1961 founding by figures including Otmar von Verschuer and Roger Pearson and its function as a platform for race science rejected by reputable journals. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/disturbing-resilience-scientific-racism-180972243/
|
||||
[^2]: "Roger Pearson," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on Pearson running Mankind Quarterly since 1978 and its characterization as a white-supremacist journal. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/roger-pearson
|
||||
[^3]: "Draper's Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science," Undark, on Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, and Robert Gayre's grants. https://race.undark.org/articles/drapers-millions-the-philanthropic-wellspring-of-modern-race-science
|
||||
[^4]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on Lynn, the Ulster Institute, and the journal's role. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/
|
||||
[^5]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30," *Mad in America,* March 2024, on the scientific rejection of hereditarian race-IQ claims. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/
|
||||
[^6]: Comas, Juan. "'Scientific' Racism Again?" *Current Anthropology,* vol. 2, 1961, and "Mankind Quarterly Under Heavy Criticism," *Current Anthropology,* 1962, on the early anthropological condemnation. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/200265
|
||||
[^7]: "Mankind Quarterly (A98)," Royal Anthropological Institute archives, on the 1962-1965 libel writ filed by Gayre, Garrett, and Gates against the RAI and the editor of *Man.* https://therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/archive-contents/mankind-quarterly-a98/
|
||||
[^8]: "Roger Pearson," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on Pearson's Council for Social and Economic Studies publishing Mankind Quarterly from 1979; and "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on the journal's move to the Ulster Institute for Social Research and Gerhard Meisenberg as editor-in-chief. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/roger-pearson
|
||||
[^9]: "Draper's Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science," Undark, on the journal's continuity from its founders into the modern network. https://race.undark.org/articles/drapers-millions-the-philanthropic-wellspring-of-modern-race-science
|
||||
[^10]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on the Dobzhansky characterization, Lynn's 1991 national-IQ paper, and the 22,000-citation figure. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/
|
||||
62
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/NSO Group.md
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62
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/NSO Group.md
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|
|
@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- NSOGroup
|
||||
- Pegasus
|
||||
- Spyware
|
||||
- Unit8200
|
||||
- Israel
|
||||
- Khashoggi
|
||||
- MBS
|
||||
- PrivateIntelligence
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- NSO Group Technologies
|
||||
summary: "NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-intelligence company founded in 2010 by Unit 8200 alumni Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio, and Niv Karmi, developer of the Pegasus spyware capable of zero-click mobile-phone compromise, whose government clients used the product to surveil over 50,000 targets including Jamal Khashoggi's family, 180 journalists, Catalan independence leaders, and Mexican activists before the July 2021 Pegasus Project exposure."
|
||||
location: "Herzliya, Israel"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-intelligence company founded in 2010 in [[Herzliya]], [[Israel]], by [[Omri Lavie|Omri Lavie]], [[Shalev Hulio|Shalev Hulio]], and [[Niv Karmi|Niv Karmi]] (the company name derives from their first initials: N-S-O). The founders are alumni of [[Unit 8200|Unit 8200]], Israel's elite military intelligence signals-and-cyber unit that serves as the incubator of the Israeli private surveillance-technology sector. NSO developed [[Pegasus (spyware)|Pegasus]], a spyware capable of zero-click mobile-phone compromise that extracts messages, emails, photos, location data, and activates cameras and microphones without the target's knowledge. The [[Pegasus Project|Pegasus Project]] investigation (July 2021), coordinated by [[Forbidden Stories|Forbidden Stories]] and [[Amnesty International|Amnesty International]] across 80 journalists from 17 media outlets, documented a leaked list of over 50,000 phone numbers selected as potential surveillance targets by NSO's government clients.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Unit 8200 Pipeline
|
||||
|
||||
Unit 8200 is the IDF signals-intelligence and cyber-warfare unit that functions as the documented talent pipeline for the Israeli private cybersecurity and surveillance industry. NSO Group's founders are alumni of the unit, as are the founders of a documented network of Israeli surveillance-technology firms that collectively constitute the "tip of the iceberg" of what the [[OCCRP|OCCRP]] and the [[Boston Review|Boston Review]] describe as a largely unregulated transnational Israeli surveillance industry. Former IDF intelligence officers and former NSO employees have gone on to found additional firms developing zero-click weapons and offensive cyber tools, extending the Unit 8200 pipeline into the broader commercial-surveillance sector.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The Unit 8200 pipeline connects the NSO Group to the broader Israeli surveillance-technology export sector documented on the [[Carbyne|Carbyne]] page (the Epstein-Barak-Israeli surveillance-tech investment chain) and to the [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]]-Israel strategic partnership. The sector operates on the model documented by the [[Jacobin|Jacobin]] reporting: Israeli surveillance technology developed through the occupation of Palestinian territories is exported commercially, with the occupied territories functioning as what critics describe as a testing laboratory.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Pegasus and the Government-Client Model
|
||||
|
||||
NSO licensed Pegasus exclusively to government clients, framing the product as a counterterrorism tool. The documented deployment went far beyond counterterrorism. The Pegasus Project investigation documented that NSO's clients used Pegasus against heads of state, government officials, journalists, activists, political opponents, and the family members of targeted individuals. The leaked list of 50,000+ phone numbers includes targets across multiple countries.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The documented deployment patterns include: [[Mexico|Mexico]] (one of NSO's largest clients, where multiple administrations used Pegasus against journalists including [[Cecilio Pineda Brito|Cecilio Pineda Brito]], activists, lawyers, and even a child, per the [[Citizen Lab|Citizen Lab]] investigation); [[Catalonia|Catalonia]] (the "[[CatalanGate|CatalanGate]]" finding by Citizen Lab in 2022 documenting dozens of Catalan independence politicians and activists targeted by the Spanish state); [[El Salvador|El Salvador]] (surveillance continuing through 2022 despite NSO's reform pledges); and the [[Saudi Arabia|Saudi]] targeting of [[Jamal Khashoggi|Khashoggi]]'s associates.[^1][^7][^8][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Khashoggi Surveillance
|
||||
|
||||
Pegasus was deployed against the associates of Jamal Khashoggi before the October 2018 murder inside the Saudi consulate in [[Istanbul|Istanbul]]. [[The Guardian|The Guardian]] reported in July 2021, based on the Pegasus Project leak, that Pegasus was found on the phone of Khashoggi's wife [[Hanan Elatr|Hanan Elatr]] months before the killing. An Emirati government agency separately placed NSO spyware on the phone of a Khashoggi associate, [[Al Jazeera|Al Jazeera]] reported. Khashoggi's friend [[Omar Abdul Aziz|Omar Abdul Aziz]] sued NSO Group, claiming the spyware enabled the murder by mapping Khashoggi's network and communications. A federal judge dismissed the widow's lawsuit against NSO in October 2023.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The Khashoggi surveillance ran through the same [[Mohammed bin Salman|MBS]]-[[WhatsApp|WhatsApp]] channel that [[Jared Kushner|Jared Kushner]] used to communicate with the Saudi crown prince, and through the broader Saudi-Emirati intelligence network that operated Pegasus against the targets. The NSO Group sits at the intersection of the documented surveillance infrastructure that enabled the Khashoggi assassination and the Kushner-MBS relationship that shaped the Trump administration's response to it.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Ownership and the Novalpina Deal
|
||||
|
||||
NSO was acquired by [[Francisco Partners|Francisco Partners]], a technology-focused private equity firm, in 2014. Francisco Partners's ownership period covered the initial expansion of the Pegasus client base across multiple governments, including the documented deployments in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the [[United Arab Emirates|United Arab Emirates]]. The Francisco Partners ownership placed a standard private-equity firm in operational control of a cyber-arms company in its portfolio.[^1][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2019, the co-founders Hulio and Lavie re-acquired NSO from Francisco Partners with funding from [[Novalpina Capital|Novalpina Capital]], a London-based private equity firm founded by [[Stephen Peel|Stephen Peel]]. The Novalpina acquisition valued NSO at approximately 1 billion dollars. The re-acquisition coincided with the period of intensifying scrutiny on NSO's government-client deployments, and the Novalpina ownership became itself a subject of controversy when Novalpina's limited partners raised concerns about the ethical implications of owning a cyber-arms company. Novalpina subsequently underwent its own internal crisis, and the ownership structure of NSO entered a period of documented instability.[^1][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The Pegasus Project investigation (July 2021) and the subsequent regulatory and legal pressure (including [[Apple|Apple]]'s lawsuit against NSO, the U.S. Commerce Department's addition of NSO to the [[Entity List|Entity List]] in November 2021, and the WhatsApp v. NSO litigation) have constrained the company's operations. The ownership trajectory from startup to Francisco Partners portfolio company to Novalpina-controlled entity to a constrained and legally challenged operation documents the arc of a private intelligence firm that operated with limited accountability through multiple ownership regimes.[^1][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: For NSO Group founding, ownership history, and the founders' Unit 8200 background, see the published NSO Group documentation and the Wikipedia record.
|
||||
[^2]: "The Pegasus Project." *Amnesty International,* July 2021. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/07/the-pegasus-project-2/
|
||||
[^3]: "Pegasus: The New Global Weapon for Silencing Journalists." *Forbidden Stories.* https://forbiddenstories.org/pegasus-the-new-global-weapon-for-silencing-journalists/
|
||||
[^4]: "Where NSO Group Came From and Why It's Just the Tip of the Iceberg." *OCCRP.* https://www.occrp.org/en/project/the-pegasus-project/where-nso-group-came-from-and-why-its-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg
|
||||
[^5]: "Cyberespionage with Benefits." *Boston Review.* https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/cyberespionage-with-benefits/
|
||||
[^6]: "Israel Has Turned the Occupied Territories Into a Laboratory for Surveillance." *Jacobin,* July 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/07/israel-occupation-surveillance-security-state-technology-export
|
||||
[^7]: "Reckless Exploit: Mexican Journalists, Lawyers, and a Child Targeted with NSO Spyware." *Citizen Lab.* https://citizenlab.ca/research/reckless-exploit-mexico-nso/
|
||||
[^8]: For the Catalonia (CatalanGate) finding, see the Citizen Lab 2022 CatalanGate report.
|
||||
[^9]: "NSO Group's Continued Surveillance." *Rest of World,* 2022 (El Salvador). https://restofworld.org/2022/nso-pegasus-el-salvador/
|
||||
[^10]: "NSO spyware used to target family of Jamal Khashoggi, leaked data shows." *The Guardian,* July 18, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-used-to-target-family-of-jamal-khashoggi-leaked-data-shows-saudis-pegasus
|
||||
[^11]: For the Novalpina Capital ownership deal, see the published NSO Group and Novalpina Capital documentation.
|
||||
36
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Open Philanthropy.md
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36
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Open Philanthropy.md
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|
|
@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- OpenPhilanthropy
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- Longtermism
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- DustinMoskovitz
|
||||
summary: "Open Philanthropy is the grantmaking organization funded by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna that became the durable financial backbone of effective altruism and AI-safety work, directing more than four billion dollars and serving as an early funder of Anthropic."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy is a grantmaking organization, funded chiefly by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife [[Cari Tuna]], that became the durable financial backbone of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and of [[Longtermism|longtermist]] and AI-safety work. Where the [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] was the movement's flashiest and most short-lived funder, Open Philanthropy is its largest sustained one, directing more than four billion dollars in grants by 2025. It was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]], and its longtime co-chief executive [[Holden Karnofsky]] later moved into AI-safety work and is married to Anthropic president [[Daniela Amodei]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Origins
|
||||
|
||||
The organization grew out of [[GiveWell]], the charity evaluator Karnofsky cofounded with [[Elie Hassenfeld]], and Good Ventures, the foundation Moskovitz and Tuna established in 2011. The two joined to form the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014, which began independent operations in 2017. Tuna, a former *Wall Street Journal* reporter, and Moskovitz, who made his fortune as one of the earliest Facebook employees and the cofounder of the software firm Asana, committed the bulk of their wealth to the effort.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The split from GiveWell separated two functions: GiveWell kept recommending a short list of proven global-health charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale allowed. [[Alexander Berger]] rose to co-chief executive alongside Karnofsky and became sole chief executive when Karnofsky stepped back in 2023. Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence the organization acknowledged when, operating as Coefficient Giving, it began advising outside donors and directed more than 100 million dollars of non-Good-Ventures money in 2024.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding Priorities and the AI Turn
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy makes grants in two broad areas: global health and wellbeing, and longtermism, the latter encompassing potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, and the far future. Its AI-risk funding flowed to the same research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] that the [[Rationalist Community]] built, making Open Philanthropy the principal institutional patron of AI-safety work outside the technology companies themselves. Karnofsky took a leave from his co-chief-executive role in 2023 and moved into a role focused on AI strategy. The organization renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2017 Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to OpenAI that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, an early and unusual instance of a funder embedding itself inside an AI lab; it later became an early investor in Anthropic, where Karnofsky's wife Daniela Amodei is president. By June 2025 the organization had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative grants. The November 2025 rename to Coefficient Giving, under chief executive Alexander Berger, marked a shift toward running multi-donor funds so other philanthropists could pool money into its cause areas, with the name chosen to signal a "coefficient" that multiplies the impact of partner giving. Its concentration of AI-safety money has drawn criticism that a single foundation funds much of the field that scrutinizes the AI labs to which it is financially tied.[^2][^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "How Effective is Effective Altruism? A Deep Dive Into Two of Open Philanthropy's EA-Inspired Programs," *Inside Philanthropy,* March 16, 2023. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2023-3-16-how-effective-is-effective-altruism-a-deep-dive-into-two-of-open-philanthropys-ea-inspired-programs
|
||||
[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin
|
||||
[^3]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on Good Ventures, GiveWell, and the Open Philanthropy partnership. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
|
||||
[^4]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder and the Karnofsky tie. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6
|
||||
[^5]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025, on the rename, Alexander Berger, the 4-billion-dollar grant total, and the multi-donor expansion; "OpenAI General Support," Good Ventures, on the March 2017 30-million-dollar grant and Karnofsky board seat. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/
|
||||
43
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/OpenAI.md
Normal file
43
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/OpenAI.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- OpenAI
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- ElonMusk
|
||||
- SiliconValley
|
||||
summary: "OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a billion-dollar pledge from backers including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, whose 2023 firing and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman exposed the conflict between its effective-altruism-aligned safety board and its commercial expansion."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence research company founded in [[San Francisco]] on December 11, 2015 as a nonprofit laboratory whose stated mission was to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Its founding was announced with a one-billion-dollar funding pledge from [[Elon Musk]], [[Sam Altman]], [[Greg Brockman]], [[Reid Hoffman]], [[Jessica Livingston]], [[Peter Thiel]], [[Amazon Web Services]], and [[Infosys]], though tax filings later showed that only about 133 million dollars had actually been received by 2021. The organization grew out of the same AI-existential-risk concern that animates the [[Rationalist Community]] and [[Effective Altruism]] movements, and its 2023 governance crisis exposed the fault line between that safety-focused mission and its commercial trajectory.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Capped-Profit Pivot
|
||||
|
||||
OpenAI was established as a counterweight to the concentration of AI capability in a single corporation, with Musk and Altman as co-chairs, Brockman as chief technology officer, and [[Ilya Sutskever]] as chief scientist. Musk departed the board in 2018 amid conflicts of interest with [[Tesla]]'s own AI work. In 2019 OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary beneath the nonprofit, took a one-billion-dollar investment from [[Microsoft]], and installed Altman as chief executive, restructuring a nonprofit research mission into an entity capable of raising commercial capital. The 2022 release of [[ChatGPT]] made OpenAI the central company of the generative-AI period.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The 2019 capped-profit entity, OpenAI LP, limited early investors to a return of 100 times their money, with lower caps for later backers such as Microsoft; profit above the cap would flow to the controlling nonprofit. Microsoft expanded its commitment to a reported 13 billion dollars by January 2023, receiving a large share of OpenAI's profits up to its cap until repaid. On October 28, 2025 OpenAI completed a further restructuring that retired the capped-profit model entirely: the nonprofit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, took a roughly 26 percent equity stake valued near 130 billion dollars in a new public-benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, Microsoft took a 27 percent stake worth about 135 billion dollars, and employees and investors held the remaining 47 percent, at a 500-billion-dollar valuation. The revised Microsoft agreement moved the power to declare that artificial general intelligence had been reached from OpenAI's board to an independent expert panel jointly established by the two companies.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### The November 2023 Board Crisis
|
||||
|
||||
On November 17, 2023, the nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, stating that he had not been "consistently candid." The voting directors were Sutskever, [[Adam D'Angelo]], the entrepreneur [[Tasha McCauley]], and [[Helen Toner]] of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology; McCauley and Toner had ties to the effective-altruism movement, and the board's concern centered on the pace of AI commercialization relative to safety. Brockman quit in protest, roughly 700 employees threatened to resign, and within 48 hours directors discussed merging OpenAI with [[Anthropic]], a step Toner was reported to have supported and that would have ended OpenAI as an independent entity. Altman was reinstated within days under a reconstituted board chaired by [[Bret Taylor]] and including [[Larry Summers]], and Sutskever, McCauley, and Toner left.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The crisis was widely read as a defeat for the effective-altruism and AI-safety wing of the company by the commercial and accelerationist wing aligned with Altman and Microsoft. Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024, and Musk sued the company and Altman the same year, alleging a betrayal of the original nonprofit mission.[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Musk's suit, filed in 2024 and later amended to name Microsoft as a defendant, alleged that OpenAI had become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft and accused Altman of "rampant self-dealing." Musk amended the complaint so that any of the roughly 150 billion dollars in damages he sought would go to OpenAI's nonprofit rather than to himself, and sought to remove Altman as chief executive and director. In May 2026 a nine-member advisory jury found that Musk had filed outside the statute of limitations, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the case.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "OpenAI launches as a nonprofit with a billion-dollar pledge," December 11, 2015; founding donors including Musk, Altman, Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, AWS, and Infosys. See IEEE Spectrum, December 2015. https://spectrum.ieee.org/billiondollar-nonprofit-ai-research-lab-to-open-in-san-francisco
|
||||
[^2]: "OpenAI says Musk only ever contributed $45 million," *TechCrunch,* March 5, 2024, on actual versus pledged funding. https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/05/openai-response-elon-musk-lawsuit/
|
||||
[^3]: "The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI's bid to save the world," *MIT Technology Review,* February 17, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/
|
||||
[^4]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained
|
||||
[^5]: "Inside the Deposition That Showed How OpenAI Nearly Destroyed Itself," *Decrypt,* on the Sutskever deposition and the discussed Anthropic merger. https://decrypt.co/347349/inside-deposition-showed-openai-nearly-destroyed-itself
|
||||
[^6]: "OpenAI, Sam Altman and Failed Governance," AKF Partners, postmortem of the November 2023 board crisis. https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/openai-sam-altman-and-failed-governance-a-postmortem-of-the-openai-governance-soap-opera
|
||||
[^7]: "Microsoft's $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty," *CNBC,* April 8, 2023, on the 100x return cap and Microsoft's expanded investment. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-openai-brings-potential-and-uncertainty.html
|
||||
[^8]: "OpenAI completes restructure, solidifying Microsoft as a major shareholder," *CNBC,* October 28, 2025, on the OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC, the 27 percent Microsoft stake, and the AGI declaration panel. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft.html
|
||||
[^9]: "Jury dismisses all claims in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman," *NPR,* May 18, 2026; "Musk's amended lawsuit against OpenAI names Microsoft as defendant," *TechCrunch,* November 14, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5822366/musk-altman-openai-jury-verdict-claims-dismissed
|
||||
63
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Palantir Technologies.md
Normal file
63
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Palantir Technologies.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Palantir
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
- DefenseContractor
|
||||
- ICE
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
- In-Q-Tel
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Palantir
|
||||
- Palantir Software
|
||||
summary: "Palantir Technologies is a data-analytics and defense contractor cofounded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings with CIA In-Q-Tel seed funding, that supplies data-integration platforms to U.S. intelligence, the Department of Defense, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement."
|
||||
location: "Denver, Colorado (headquarters)"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Palantir Technologies is an American data-analytics and software company founded in 2003 by [[Peter Thiel]], [[Alex Karp]], [[Joe Lonsdale|Joseph Lonsdale]], [[Stephen Cohen]], and [[Nathan Gettings]]. The company builds data-integration and decision-support platforms for government and commercial clients, and is structured around two principal products: [[Palantir Gotham|Gotham]], oriented to intelligence and defense users, and [[Palantir Foundry|Foundry]], oriented to commercial enterprises. The company received early institutional backing from the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] venture-capital arm [[In-Q-Tel]], and Thiel has served as chairman since founding. The company went public on the [[New York Stock Exchange]] in September 2020 under the ticker PLTR.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The company's client base spans the agencies that consume intelligence and law-enforcement data, and its contracting posture is to build the shared data substrate across those agencies that the agencies themselves have not built internally. The 2026 [[Dialog]] leak placed Palantir's chairman (Thiel) at the center of an off-the-record convening network whose government-side attendees include the congressional oversight and military-command principals responsible for the agencies Palantir serves.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and In-Q-Tel
|
||||
|
||||
Palantir was founded in 2003 in the aftermath of the [[September 11 attacks|9/11 attacks]], with Thiel as the founding financier and chairman. The company's stated founding premise was that U.S. intelligence agencies possessed large volumes of data in mutually incompatible silos and lacked the software to fuse it into operational intelligence, a gap the [[9/11 Commission]] had identified. The Central Intelligence Agency venture arm In-Q-Tel provided early funding. Karp, a law-school contemporary of Thiel at [[Stanford Law School]], serves as chief executive and is the public face of the company.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The founding team included Lonsdale, then a recent [[Stanford University]] graduate who had worked at Thiel's [[Clarium Capital]], as a founding engineer. Cohen and Gettings rounded out the technical cofounding group. The [[PayPal Mafia]] lineage is direct: the fraud-detection heritage is consciously modeled on the anti-fraud data systems Thiel and [[Max Levchin]] built at [[PayPal]]. Palantir's data-fusion architecture for intelligence and law enforcement is an adaptation of the payments-fraud-detection architecture, the basis for the recurring internal claim that the company "does for governments what PayPal did for fraud."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Gotham and the Intelligence Client Base
|
||||
|
||||
[[Gotham]] is Palantir's government platform, deployed across the Central Intelligence Agency, the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]], the Department of Defense, the [[National Security Agency|NSA]], and allied foreign intelligence services. The platform integrates structured and unstructured data from multiple source systems into a unified ontology, allowing analysts to query across what would otherwise be siloed databases. The company's early growth was driven by counterterrorism and defense contracting in the post-9/11 period, and Palantir was used in the operation that located [[Osama bin Laden]] in 2011, according to company and press accounts.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The ontology approach distinguishes Gotham from a data warehouse. Rather than copying data into a central store, Gotham defines a common object model (people, organizations, events, locations, documents) and maps each connected source system's data into that model, so that an analyst querying "all financial transactions involving this person and their known associates" pulls from the connected financial, communications, and travel databases in a single query. The platform's power scales with the number and sensitivity of the connected sources, so the client roster, not the software, measures the reach.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### ICE and Immigration Enforcement
|
||||
|
||||
The ICE relationship began in 2013 with the [[FALCON]] analytical platform, which integrates data from multiple federal and state sources (including [[Homeland Security Investigations]] and state [[Department of Motor Vehicles]] records) into a unified analytical view. In 2014, ICE awarded Palantir the [[Investigative Case Management]] (ICM) contract for over 41 million dollars, extending FALCON's analytical capability into the full case-management lifecycle from criminal and civil detention through deportation. [[EPIC]] (Electronic Privacy Information Center) documented the system's capabilities through the [[EPIC v. ICE|EPIC v. ICE]] FOIA litigation.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[WNYC]] reporting documented, on the basis of obtained emails, that Palantir created a smartphone application ICE uses to plan and execute workplace raids. The [[404 Media]] reporting documented the [[ELITE (app)|ELITE]] app, which ICE uses to identify neighborhoods for enforcement operations. In the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration, ICE awarded Palantir a 30 million dollar contract for [[ImmigrationOS]], extending the FALCON/ICM capability into a comprehensive immigration-tracking system. The [[ACLU]] published "All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump's Abusive Removal Campaign" documenting the expanded role.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Amnesty International]] published a September 2020 briefing finding that Palantir's ICM and FALCON platforms risk contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants. The [[American Immigration Council]] documented that FALCON and ICM have been used in workplace raids since deployment. Palantir employees in 2018 and 2019 circulated petitions asking the company to cancel the ICE work. The company declined.[^1][^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Foundry and Commercial Expansion
|
||||
|
||||
Foundry is the commercial-platform product, deployed by major airlines, financial institutions, health systems, and energy companies for internal data integration. Foundry represented Palantir's pivot from a government-only contractor to a dual government-and-commercial business, and accounts for a growing share of revenue. The same ontology architecture that powers Gotham is applied to corporate data silos (supply chain, customer records, sensor feeds), with the commercial revenue subsidizing the lower-margin government work and reducing the company's dependence on any single federal client.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The company took its initial public offering in September 2020 via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange rather than a traditional underwritten IPO. The company's early public filings emphasized its rejection of conventional corporate-governance norms, including a dual-class share structure that consolidated control in the founders.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Israel Strategic Partnership
|
||||
|
||||
In January 2024, Palantir announced a strategic partnership with the [[Israeli Ministry of Defense]] to supply technology for "war-related missions" during the [[Gaza war]], following a visit to Israel by Karp and Thiel. The official Palantir statement reads: "We have agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply Palantir technology to help the country's war effort." [[Bloomberg]] reported the partnership on January 12, 2024, and [[Calcalist]] confirmed the defense-ministry relationship.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Gotham is marketed on Palantir's own website as supporting soldiers with an "AI-powered kill chain," integrating target identification and targeting capabilities. Karp publicly told [[CNBC]] that the company's technology is being used in the Middle East war. Multiple reports (including [[Middle East Eye]]) link Palantir's Gotham platform to Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. [[Jeremy Corbyn]] criticized the UK government's 240 million pound Palantir contract for NHS data work in light of the Israeli partnership.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: For Palantir corporate history, products, and client base, see primary corporate filings (SEC EDGAR, Form S-1 filed September 2020 for the direct listing) and the company's annual reports at investors.palantir.com.
|
||||
[^2]: Lonsdale's account of the Palantir founding and his role as founding engineer is documented in his own writing and in contemporaneous Silicon Valley press; synthesized here.
|
||||
[^3]: ICE FALCON contract documented through EPIC v. ICE FOIA litigation (https://epic.org/documents/epic-v-ice-palantir-databases/) and ICE contract HSCETC-15-C-00001 (https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/contracts/palantirTechHSCETC15C00001.pdf). For the smartphone raid app, see WNYC (https://www.wnyc.org/story/palantir-directly-powers-ice-workplace-raids-emails-show/). For ImmigrationOS, see Immigration Policy Tracking Project (https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-palantir-awarded-30-million-to-build-immigrationos-surveillance-platform-for-ice/). For the ACLU analysis, see https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deportation-roundup. For the Amnesty International briefing, see https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Amnest-International-Palantir-Briefing-Report-092520_Final.pdf.
|
||||
[^4]: For the ELITE neighborhood-targeting app, see *404 Media* reporting. For the American Immigration Council analysis, see https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/.
|
||||
[^5]: "Palantir, Israel Agree Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech." *Bloomberg,* January 12, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-israel-agree-to-strategic-partnership-for-battle-tech ; "Palantir supplying Israel with technology to help in war effort." *Calcalist CTech.* https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rymy7ret6 ; "Corbyn slams UK for deal with Israel-linked US tech giant Palantir." *Middle East Eye.* https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/corbyn-slams-uk-ps240m-deal-israeli-military-linked-tech-giant-palantir
|
||||
60
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/PayPal Mafia.md
Normal file
60
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/PayPal Mafia.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- PayPalMafia
|
||||
- SiliconValley
|
||||
- PayPal
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- ElonMusk
|
||||
- ReidHoffman
|
||||
- MaxLevchin
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- PayPal Mafia
|
||||
summary: "The PayPal Mafia is the informal network of founders and early executives of PayPal who, after the company's 2002 sale to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars, dispersed to found or lead the subsequent generation of Silicon Valley companies including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, Tesla, SpaceX, and the convening network Dialog."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco Bay Area"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The PayPal Mafia is the informal network of founders and early executives of [[PayPal]] who, after the company's 2002 sale to [[eBay]] for 1.5 billion dollars, dispersed to found or lead much of the subsequent generation of [[Silicon Valley]] companies. The cohort acquired the "Mafia" label as a recognizable social and commercial network whose members sit on each other's boards, invest in each other's ventures, and convene, through [[Dialog]], in the same off-the-record settings. Six members of the network appear on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster, and the documented commercial, convening, ideological, and political infrastructure of the [[Thiel Influence Network]] runs substantially through the PayPal Mafia cohort.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The PayPal Period (1998-2002)
|
||||
|
||||
[[Peter Thiel]] founded Confinity in 1998 to develop security software for handheld devices, pivoting into the person-to-person payments product that became PayPal. Confinity merged with [[Elon Musk]]'s X.com in 2000 to form PayPal, with Thiel as chief executive and Musk as the largest shareholder. The merger resolved a direct competition between the two companies that had produced a mutually destructive customer-acquisition war. The company went public in February 2002 and was acquired by eBay in October 2002 for 1.5 billion dollars. The exit dispersed a cohort of founders and early engineers, each capitalized at levels that permitted the founding of the subsequent generation of consumer-internet, payments, and defense-technology companies.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The anti-fraud data architecture that Thiel and [[Max Levchin]] built at PayPal was the technical foundation of the subsequent Palantir Technologies government-data-fusion platform. The PayPal system integrated credit-card transaction data, user-behavior signals, and network-graph analytics to identify fraudulent accounts in real time. The same architecture, applied to intelligence and law-enforcement data sources, became the [[Palantir Gotham|Palantir Gotham]] ontology approach. The documented lineage from PayPal fraud detection to Palantir government data fusion is the technical continuity between the two companies.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Principal Members and Their Subsequent Ventures
|
||||
|
||||
Max Levchin was PayPal's chief technology officer and cofounder. Levchin subsequently founded [[Affirm]] (the buy-now-pay-later lender, taken public in 2021), served on the boards of [[Yelp]] and [[Evernote]], and established himself as the technical conscience of the PayPal Mafia cohort. Levchin's anti-fraud architecture patent portfolio underlies portions of the subsequent payments-technology industry.
|
||||
|
||||
[[Reid Hoffman]] served as executive vice president and a founding board member, responsible for external relations and partnerships. Hoffman subsequently founded [[LinkedIn]] (2002, before the eBay sale closed), took it public in 2011, sold it to [[Microsoft]] for 26.2 billion dollars in 2016, and joined [[Greylock Partners|Greylock]] as a general partner in 2009. Hoffman's politics diverge from the Thiel-Musk Republican alignment: he has been a prominent [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] donor supporting [[Joe Biden]] and [[Kamala Harris]]. His documented [[Jeffrey Epstein|Epstein]] relationship (the image-rehabilitation apology, the 2015 dinner) places a Democratic-aligned PayPal Mafia principal inside the same post-conviction Epstein network as the Republican-aligned Thiel.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Elon Musk founded X.com (the precursor to PayPal) and was PayPal's largest shareholder before and after the Confinity merger. Musk subsequently founded [[SpaceX]] (2002), joined [[Tesla, Inc.|Tesla]] as lead investor and chairman in 2004 (later chief executive), and acquired [[X (social media)|X (formerly Twitter)]] in 2022. Musk's documented [[Vladimir Putin|Putin]] contact channel (since late 2022, per the [[Wall Street Journal]]), the [[Jonathan Buma|Buma]]-documented GRU targeting of Musk, the [[Igor Kurganov|Kurganov]] infiltration, and the [[NLRB Data Exfiltration|NLRB data exfiltration]] through [[Department of Government Efficiency|DOGE]] all place Musk at the intersection of the PayPal Mafia commercial network and the documented Russian-intelligence and federal-data-access questions.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
[[David Sacks]] served as chief operating officer. Sacks subsequently founded [[Yammer]] (acquired by Microsoft in 2012), produced the film *[[Thank You for Smoking|Thank You for Smoking]]*, and served in the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration as the White House [[AI and cryptocurrency|AI and cryptocurrency]] czar, formally the Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency. Sacks hosted the [[All-In Podcast|All-In Podcast]], which became a documented media channel for the PayPal Mafia cohort's political positions during the 2022-2025 period.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Ken Howery]] served as chief financial officer and subsequently cofounded [[Founders Fund]] with Thiel and [[Luke Nosek]]. Howery served as the [[United States Ambassador to Sweden|U.S. Ambassador to Sweden]] during the first Trump administration (2019-2021), receiving a formal diplomatic appointment through the Thiel-Trump relationship.
|
||||
|
||||
Luke Nosek was a founding team member and subsequently a Founders Fund partner. Nosek sits on the SpaceX board, maintaining a formal board role at a Musk company across the post-PayPal period.
|
||||
|
||||
[[Roelof Botha]] served as chief financial officer and subsequently joined [[Sequoia Capital]] as a partner. Botha's Sequoia portfolio includes [[YouTube]] (where he facilitated the Google acquisition), [[Square]] (the payments company, now [[Block (company)|Block]]), and [[Unity Technologies]]. Botha represents the PayPal Mafia cohort's penetration of the broader venture-capital establishment through Sequoia, the firm historically dominant in Silicon Valley venture investing.
|
||||
|
||||
[[Keith Rabois]] served in an executive role and subsequently held positions at Founders Fund, [[OpenStore]], and PayPal-adjacent ventures. Rabois has been a documented intermediary between the PayPal Mafia cohort and the broader [[Khosla Ventures|Khosla Ventures]] and Founders Fund networks.
|
||||
|
||||
[[Jeremy Stoppelman]] subsequently cofounded Yelp. [[Chad Hurley]], [[Steve Chen]], and [[Jawed Karim]] were early PayPal engineers who subsequently cofounded YouTube, which [[Google]] acquired for 1.65 billion dollars in 2006.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2016 Trump Campaign and Mercer Money
|
||||
|
||||
The PayPal Mafia cohort's political activity converged on the 2016 Trump campaign through Thiel's endorsement and the [[Mercer family|Mercer family]] connection. The Mercers funded [[Breitbart|Breitbart News]] (through which [[Steve Bannon|Steve Bannon]] operated), [[Cambridge Analytica|Cambridge Analytica]] (the data-targeting firm), and the pro-Trump super PACs. Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, donated over one million dollars to Trump-supporting efforts, and served on the transition executive committee. The documented convergence of the Thiel commercial network ([[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]], Founders Fund) with the Mercer political network (Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica) through the Trump campaign is the political instance of the PayPal Mafia cohort's federal-power exercise.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The cohort's internal political divergence has been documented across the 2016-2025 period. Hoffman has been the principal Democratic-aligned member, funding Democratic candidates and opposing Trump. Musk moved from apolitical to Republican-aligned across 2022-2024, acquiring X and shifting its content moderation toward the Republican position. Sacks moved into the formal Trump administration. Thiel funded the [[JD Vance]] and [[Blake Masters]] Senate campaigns and brokered the Vance vice-presidential selection. The documented divergence within the cohort has not fractured the commercial and convening relationships: Hoffman appears on the leaked 2026 Dialog roster alongside Thiel and Musk, placing the Democratic-aligned and Republican-aligned principals in the same off-the-record setting.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
|
||||
[^2]: "Exclusive: Reid Hoffman apologizes for role in Epstein-linked donations to MIT." *Axios,* September 12, 2019. https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations ; "Epstein's Silicon Valley ties extended beyond just Musk and Gates." *CNBC,* February 9, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/tech-leaders-epstein-records-silicon-valley-sergey-brin-thiel-sinofsky-reid-hoffman-musk-gates.html
|
||||
[^3]: Founders Fund, "Portfolio," documenting the firm's Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and Affirm positions; the firm was founded in 2005 by Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek. https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/
|
||||
[^4]: "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia
|
||||
[^5]: "Statement by President-elect Donald J. Trump Announcing the Appointment of David O. Sacks as 'White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.'" December 5, 2024, archived at The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-president-elect-donald-j-trump-announcing-the-appointment-david-o-sacks-white
|
||||
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Per Aspera Policy.md
Normal file
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Per Aspera Policy.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- PerAsperaPolicy
|
||||
- DarkMoney
|
||||
- 501c4
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- JDVance
|
||||
- RepublicanParty
|
||||
- PoliticalSpending
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Per Aspera Policy
|
||||
summary: "Per Aspera Policy is a Thiel-tied 501(c)(4) dark-money organization that steered approximately 200,000 dollars to the Protect Ohio Values super PAC supporting JD Vance's 2022 Ohio Senate primary alongside Thiel's direct contributions, documented by OpenSecrets in February 2022."
|
||||
location: "United States"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[[Per Aspera Policy|Per Aspera Policy]] is a [[501(c)(4)|501(c)(4)]] social-welfare organization tied to [[Peter Thiel]] that steered approximately 200,000 dollars to the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values]] super PAC supporting the [[JD Vance]] 2022 Ohio Senate primary campaign, alongside Thiel's approximately fifteen million dollars in direct super-PAC contributions. [[OpenSecrets]] reported the transfer in February 2022 as part of its analysis of dark-money spending in the 2022 election cycle. The 501(c)(4) form permits political spending without donor disclosure, which is the structural feature that distinguishes the Per Aspera vehicle from the disclosed super-PAC spending.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 501(c)(4) Structure and the Disclosure Gap
|
||||
|
||||
501(c)(4) organizations are designated under the [[Internal Revenue Code|Internal Revenue Code]] as social-welfare organizations. They are permitted to engage in political activity, including independent expenditure in support of or opposition to candidates, without disclosing their donors to the public. The only disclosure required is to the [[Internal Revenue Service|IRS]] on the annual Form 990, and even that disclosure is subject to redaction for donor-identity protection. The structural consequence is that a 501(c)(4) can transfer funds to a super PAC, which must disclose its receipts, without revealing the original source of the funds.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The Per Aspera-to-Protect Ohio Values transfer follows this structure. The super PAC disclosed that it received approximately 200,000 dollars from Per Aspera Policy. Per Aspera Policy did not disclose its donors. The identity of the individuals or entities that funded the 200,000 dollar transfer beyond the Per Aspera vehicle is not part of the public record.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Leonard Leo Parallel
|
||||
|
||||
The Per Aspera Policy vehicle operates in the same 501(c)(4) dark-money ecosystem as the [[Leonard Leo|Leonard Leo]]-linked vehicles (the [[Judicial Crisis Network|Judicial Crisis Network]] / [[Concord Fund|Concord Fund]] network) that directed approximately one billion dollars into the conservative judicial-selection project. The JCN brought in nearly 48.1 million dollars in a single reporting period to support the [[Neil Gorsuch|Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh|Kavanaugh]], and [[Amy Coney Barrett|Barrett]] confirmation campaigns, per [[CREW|Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington]]. The Leo-linked and Thiel-linked vehicles use the same 501(c)(4) structure to fund political and institutional activities whose donor base is not publicly traceable.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The Thiel and Leo networks share the [[Teneo Network|Teneo Network]] institutional terrain through [[Evan Baehr]], who founded Teneo in 2008 and who moved in the Thiel orbit before the founding. Both networks fund through 501(c)(4) vehicles that transfer to super PACs (the Per Aspera-to-Protect Ohio Values transfer mirrors the JCN-to-confirmation-campaign transfer), and both operate through the Teneo Network for the broader institutional-placement function. The [[Senate Judiciary Committee|Senate Judiciary Committee]] under Chairman [[Dick Durbin|Dick Durbin]] sought Leo's records and testimony on the JCN network; Leo declined to comply.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/
|
||||
[^2]: "Inside the 'Private and Confidential' Conservative Group That Promises to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *ProPublica,* March 15, 2023, documenting Leo's Teneo Network chairmanship and the shared conservative dark-money terrain. https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents
|
||||
[^3]: Internal Revenue Service, "Social Welfare Organizations" (Section 501(c)(4)), describing the political-activity and donor-disclosure rules. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/social-welfare-organizations
|
||||
[^4]: "Vance surges to victory in Ohio's record-breaking Senate primary." *OpenSecrets,* May 2022, documenting the Thiel-funded Protect Ohio Values super PAC spending. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/05/vance-surges-to-victory-in-ohios-record-breaking-senate-primary
|
||||
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Pioneer Fund.md
Normal file
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Pioneer Fund.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- PioneerFund
|
||||
- Eugenics
|
||||
- RaceScience
|
||||
- HumanBiodiversity
|
||||
- DarkMoney
|
||||
summary: "The Pioneer Fund is a New York foundation established in 1937 to promote eugenics and 'race betterment' that became the principal financier of race-and-intelligence research in the United States, funding many of the scholars cited in The Bell Curve and the journal Mankind Quarterly."
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Pioneer Fund is a foundation established in [[New York City|New York]] in 1937 to promote eugenics and what its founders called "race betterment," which over the following decades became the leading financier of race-and-intelligence research in the United States. It funded many of the scholars whose work underlies the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] current, including thirteen researchers cited in [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve*, and it bankrolled the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]] and the [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]]. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classifies it as a hate group.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and Mission
|
||||
|
||||
The fund was created by the textile heir [[Wickliffe Draper]], with the eugenicist [[Harry Laughlin]], an architect of American sterilization laws and an admirer of [[Nazi Germany|Nazi]] race policy, as its first president. Its charter aimed at "racial improvement" through the encouragement of procreation among descendants of the original colonial-stock population and the study of heredity and "race betterment." In its early decades it also funded efforts to resist desegregation and to promote the repatriation of black Americans.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The fund was incorporated in New York on March 11, 1937. Its five original directors were Draper, Laughlin, the demographer [[Frederick Osborn]], the lawyer Malcolm Donald, and [[John Marshall Harlan II]], the future Associate Justice of the [[Supreme Court of the United States]]. Draper had toured [[Germany]] in 1935 and met leading Third Reich eugenicists, and the fund's founding charter limited its procreation incentives to people "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." Laughlin had received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his contributions to German racial science.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding Race Science
|
||||
|
||||
From the postwar period onward the fund became the central money source for hereditarian psychology and the race-and-IQ literature. Its grantees included the psychologists [[Arthur Jensen]], [[William Shockley]], [[Hans Eysenck]], and [[Richard Lynn]], and the fund was later led by [[J. Philippe Rushton]], a psychologist known for claims of a racial hierarchy of intelligence. Murray acknowledged in the afterword to *The Bell Curve* that he had cited thirteen Pioneer Fund grantees. The fund also supported anti-immigration organizations, linking the eugenics-research network to the immigration-restriction politics promoted by figures such as [[John Tanton]] and [[Steve Sailer]].[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York lawyer [[Harry F. Weyher Jr.]] ran the fund as president from 1958 to 2002, a 44-year tenure during which he directed more than $3.5 million to race-and-intelligence researchers; his interest in the fund grew from its opposition to the 1954 *[[Brown v. Board of Education]]* desegregation ruling, and Pioneer money underwrote legal and research efforts to resist integration in the 1960s. When Weyher died in March 2002 Rushton became president, and on Rushton's death in October 2012 Lynn succeeded him, routing further grants through his Ulster Institute for Social Research. The historian [[William H. Tucker]] documented this funding chain in his 2002 book *The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund*.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, on the 1937 founding, Wickliffe Draper, Harry Laughlin, and the hate-group classification. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/pioneer-fund/
|
||||
[^2]: "Pioneer Fund," SourceWatch, on the fund's grantees, the Bell Curve citations, and Mankind Quarterly. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund
|
||||
[^3]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve.* Free Press, 1994, afterword acknowledging the Pioneer Fund-funded sources.
|
||||
[^4]: "London Conference on Intelligence exposes link between academic promotion of eugenics and Conservative right," TruePublica, 2018, on the Pioneer Fund, the Ulster Institute, and Mankind Quarterly network. https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/london-conference-intelligence-exposes-link-academic-promotion-eugenics-conservative-right/
|
||||
[^5]: "Pioneer Fund," SourceWatch, on the March 11, 1937 incorporation, the five original directors including John Marshall Harlan II, and the colonial-stock charter language. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund
|
||||
[^6]: Tucker, William H. "Toward a racial abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the origins of The Pioneer Fund," *Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,* 2002, on Draper's 1935 Germany visit and Laughlin's Heidelberg degree. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12115787/
|
||||
[^7]: "Key Race Scientist Takes Reins at Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002, on Harry Weyher's 1958-2002 presidency, the $3.5 million in grants, the Brown v. Board opposition, and Rushton's succession. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/key-race-scientist-takes-reins-pioneer-fund/
|
||||
[^8]: Tucker, William H. *The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.* University of Illinois Press, 2002.
|
||||
48
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Safe Superintelligence.md
Normal file
48
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Safe Superintelligence.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- SafeSuperintelligence
|
||||
- IlyaSutskever
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- AISafety
|
||||
- VentureCapital
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- SSI
|
||||
- Safe Superintelligence Inc.
|
||||
summary: "Safe Superintelligence is the AI lab Ilya Sutskever cofounded in June 2024 with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, built to pursue a single safe-superintelligence goal with no commercial product, which raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion valuation and later 2 billion at a 32-billion valuation before Meta poached Gross and Sutskever became chief executive."
|
||||
location: "Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an artificial-intelligence research company founded in June 2024 by [[Ilya Sutskever]], the former chief scientist of [[OpenAI]], together with the investor and former Apple AI executive [[Daniel Gross]] and the former OpenAI researcher Daniel Levy. The company was announced with a one-sentence mission, that it had "one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence," and was structured deliberately to ship no commercial products until that goal is reached, insulating its research from the revenue pressures that shaped OpenAI and [[Anthropic]]. It operates from offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the No-Product Model
|
||||
|
||||
Sutskever left OpenAI on May 14, 2024, months after the November 2023 board crisis in which he had voted to remove and then reinstate chief executive [[Sam Altman]], and announced SSI roughly a month later. His cofounder Daniel Gross had founded the personal-assistant startup Cue, sold it to [[Apple]] in 2013, run AI efforts there, and become a partner at [[Y Combinator]] before partnering with the former [[GitHub]] chief executive Nat Friedman to run the venture fund NFDG; Daniel Levy had led the optimization team under Sutskever at OpenAI. In its launch statement the founders framed the single-goal structure as a feature, writing that the company's "singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures."[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The company has published no products, papers, or model releases of note, and its website functions as little more than the founding statement. The deliberate absence of a product made SSI an unusual fundraising case: investors backed a research program with no revenue, no public benchmarks, and an explicitly open-ended timeline, on the strength of Sutskever's record and the safety-first thesis.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding Rounds and Investors
|
||||
|
||||
In September 2024 SSI raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion-dollar valuation, in a round whose backers included [[Andreessen Horowitz]], Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel, and NFDG, the fund run by Gross and Friedman. The three-month-old company had no product, yet the round placed it among the most richly valued AI startups of its cohort. Reporting in early 2025 indicated a far larger follow-on, and in April 2025 the company was reported to have raised an additional 2 billion dollars at a 32-billion-dollar valuation, led by Greenoaks, which put in a reported 500 million dollars, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and DST Global.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Among the later backers were [[Google|Alphabet]] and [[Nvidia]], both strategic investors with stakes in AI infrastructure, and Google Cloud became a major compute provider to the lab, supplying it with Tensor Processing Units.[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Meta Approach and Sutskever as CEO
|
||||
|
||||
In June 2025 [[Meta]] Platforms, building its superintelligence division under [[Mark Zuckerberg]], attempted to acquire SSI outright. Sutskever rebuffed the approach. Meta instead hired Gross, who had been SSI's chief executive, along with his NFDG partner Nat Friedman, in a transaction in which Meta took a stake in the NFDG fund; Gross departed SSI on June 29, 2025 to work on AI products at Meta. On July 3, 2025 Sutskever announced that he had become chief executive of SSI, with Daniel Levy as president and the technical staff continuing to report to him.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Sutskever ruled out any sale of the company, writing that "we are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through. We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence." Gross, for his part, said as he left that he expected "miracles" from the lab he had cofounded. The episode left Sutskever as both the public face and the operating head of a lab that had been built around his name and continued to hold its 32-billion-dollar valuation without a product.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Safe Superintelligence Inc.," company launch statement, June 19, 2024, on the founders, the "one goal and one product" mission, and the no-distraction business model. https://ssi.inc/
|
||||
[^2]: "Safe Superintelligence Raises $2 Billion at $32 Billion Valuation Despite No Public Product," VC Tavern, 2025, on the no-product model and the placeholder website. https://vctavern.com/safe-superintelligence-raises-2-billion-at-32-billion-valuation-despite-no-public-product/
|
||||
[^3]: "Daniel Gross Investments," Hustle Fund, on Gross's founding of Cue, the Apple acquisition, his Y Combinator partnership, and the NFDG fund with Nat Friedman. https://www.hustlefund.vc/post/angel-squad-daniel-gross-investments-the-israeli-american-who-built-a-supercomputer-for-ai-startups-before-anyone-else-thought-to
|
||||
[^4]: "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B," *TechCrunch,* April 12, 2025, on the September 2024 round, the April 2025 round led by Greenoaks, and the Alphabet, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and DST Global backers. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-reportedly-valued-at-32b
|
||||
[^5]: "AI's Big Day: Startup Safe Superintelligence Raises $1B At Reported $5B Valuation," *Crunchbase News,* September 4, 2024, on the 1-billion September 2024 round at a 5-billion valuation with Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/startup-safe-superintelligence-unicorn-raise/
|
||||
[^6]: "Alphabet, Nvidia bet on OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's $32B AI startup," *TipRanks,* 2025, on the Alphabet and Nvidia strategic stakes and the Google Cloud TPU compute arrangement. https://www.tipranks.com/news/alphabet-nvidia-bet-on-openai-co-founder-sutskevers-32b-ai-startup
|
||||
[^7]: "Ilya Sutskever is CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta hired Gross," *CNBC,* July 3, 2025, on the Meta acquisition attempt, Gross's June 29 departure, and Sutskever becoming CEO with the "we know what to do" statement. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html
|
||||
[^8]: "Meta tried to buy Safe Superintelligence, hired CEO Daniel Gross," *CNBC,* June 19, 2025, on Meta's NFDG stake, the hiring of Gross and Friedman, and Gross's "miracles" remark. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-superintelligence-hired-ceo-daniel-gross.html
|
||||
45
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/SafeGraph.md
Normal file
45
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/SafeGraph.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- SafeGraph
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
- DataBroker
|
||||
- LocationData
|
||||
- CDC
|
||||
- AurenHoffman
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- SafeGraph Inc.
|
||||
summary: "SafeGraph is a location-data brokerage founded in 2014 by Auren Hoffman that aggregates and resells mobile-device location pings collected from smartphone applications, and whose 2020 contract to supply cell-phone location data to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surfaced the warrantless availability of commercial location data to federal agencies."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
SafeGraph is an American location-data brokerage founded in 2014 by [[Auren Hoffman]] that aggregates and resells mobile-device location pings collected from smartphone applications. The company packages the data into datasets used in academic research, real-estate analysis, retail-site selection, and advertising, and has repeatedly drawn scrutiny over the granularity of its data and its accessibility to government clients. Hoffman's role as SafeGraph's founder and as chairman of the secret society [[Dialog]] places the firm at the intersection of the consumer-data-brokerage industry and the Thiel-organized elite-convening network exposed in the June 2026 Dialog leak.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
A location-data broker collects, cleans, and resells the GPS traces that smartphone applications generate as a condition of their operation; the broker's value is in the aggregation and the joins. When the same firm sells that aggregated data to a federal agency for warrantless use, the distinction between commercial surveillance and state surveillance collapses, because the data is identical and the legal authority differs only in the procurement channel.
|
||||
|
||||
### Data Sourcing and Products
|
||||
|
||||
SafeGraph aggregates location data purchased from smartphone-application developers whose apps request location permissions from their users. The applications, which span weather, shopping, local-news, and utility categories, collect continuous GPS traces from the devices of users who have granted location access, and sell those traces to data brokers including SafeGraph. The broker deduplicates, anonymizes (in the sense that direct identifiers are stripped, though the traces themselves are unique to a device), and packages the data into products: SafeGraph Places (point-of-interest and foot-traffic data), SafeGraph Patterns (aggregated device-movement patterns), and SafeGraph Spend (consumer spending tied to location).[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
A continuous GPS trace is a de-facto identifier: the location of a device at 3 a.m. is the location of its owner's home, and the home is the person. Academic and journalistic research has repeatedly demonstrated that "anonymized" location traces can be re-identified to specific individuals, and SafeGraph's datasets have been the subject of published re-identification studies. The company's position has been that its aggregation and contractual use restrictions address the privacy concern; its critics' position has been that the re-identification risk is intrinsic to the data type.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The CDC Contract and Federal Location-Data Procurement
|
||||
|
||||
In 2020 the U.S. [[Centers for Disease Control and Prevention|CDC]] contracted with SafeGraph for cell-phone location data to monitor compliance with [[COVID-19]] pandemic movement restrictions. The contract, reported in *The Wall Street Journal* and elsewhere, made publicly visible what had been an open practice in the federal procurement of commercial location data: agencies including the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, and components of the intelligence community purchase commercially collected location data from brokers rather than obtaining it through legal process, because the data is offered for sale on the open market and its purchase is not subject to the warrant requirement that would attach to compelled disclosure.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The legal framing is the [[third-party doctrine]]: data voluntarily disclosed to a third party (the application developer, the broker) loses the Fourth Amendment protection it would have if held by the user. The CDC contract, by surfacing the practice, drew attention to the broader federal procurement of commercial location data and to the specific role of SafeGraph as a supplier. The 2026 Dialog leak renewed scrutiny of the same firm because its founder, Hoffman, chairs the off-the-record gathering whose government-side attendees include the congressional oversight principals responsible for the agencies that buy SafeGraph's data.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Dialog Intersection
|
||||
|
||||
The 2026 Dialog leak placed Hoffman as chairman of the convening network whose registrants include sitting U.S. senators, governors, military commanders, and technology executives, while SafeGraph, the firm he founded and chaired, supplies location data to federal agencies. The same individual runs the convening at which the regulators and the regulated meet off the record, and runs the firm whose data product the regulators procure. The pathway is not alleged to be corruptly used; the 2026 leak is the first primary record of the membership across which the overlap occurs.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Palantir Technologies]] (intelligence and law-enforcement data fusion), [[LiveRamp]] (identity resolution), and SafeGraph (location data) are firms whose commercial and government uses share a technical substrate. Their principals sit in the same off-the-record room as the government clients, and all three sit within the Dialog membership.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
|
||||
[^2]: For SafeGraph's products, data sourcing, and the academic re-identification literature on anonymized location data, see the company's published documentation and the published re-identification studies (e.g., de Montjoye et al., *Nature Scientific Reports,* 2013) on location-trace uniqueness.
|
||||
[^3]: For the CDC contract and the federal procurement of commercial location data in 2020, see *The Wall Street Journal* and *Vice Motherboard* reporting on federal agency purchases of SafeGraph and rival broker data during the COVID-19 pandemic.
|
||||
53
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Schmidt Futures.md
Normal file
53
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Schmidt Futures.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- SchmidtFutures
|
||||
- SchmidtSciences
|
||||
- EricSchmidt
|
||||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Schmidt Futures
|
||||
- Schmidt Sciences
|
||||
summary: "Schmidt Futures is the philanthropic venture Eric and Wendy Schmidt launched in 2017 to fund science and technology talent, which paid the salaries of White House science staff before consolidating its core programs into Schmidt Sciences in 2024."
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Schmidt Futures is the philanthropic venture launched in 2017 by [[Eric Schmidt]], the former [[Google]] chief executive, and his wife [[Wendy Schmidt]] to identify and fund talent in science and technology. It is structured as an initiative of Futures Action Network LLC, a Schmidt-controlled entity, and is funded chiefly through the [[Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation]], a private foundation; it is distinct from the older [[Schmidt Family Foundation]], which runs the couple's environmental and climate grantmaking. In 2024 Schmidt Futures consolidated its core scientific work into a new charitable organization, [[Schmidt Sciences]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and Structure
|
||||
|
||||
Schmidt Futures grew out of the Schmidt family's earlier philanthropic operations, which Eric Braverman had directed before helping launch and lead the new venture as its chief executive; Braverman had previously run the [[Clinton Foundation]] from 2013 to 2015. Rather than a conventional foundation, Schmidt Futures was set up as a "philanthropic initiative" of a limited-liability company, an arrangement that gave it flexibility to make grants, investments, and program-related spending while disclosing less than a traditional nonprofit. Its money flows largely from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, the private foundation that holds the couple's charitable assets for this work.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The venture described its mission as betting on exceptional people early, funding what it called "moonshots" and talent pipelines across the sciences, artificial-intelligence research, and public policy. Its spending reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars across its programs, and Eric Schmidt repeatedly framed it as venture-style philanthropy aimed at returns measured in scientific breakthroughs and policy influence rather than money.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Programs
|
||||
|
||||
Schmidt Futures ran a cluster of fellowship and talent programs. Rise, launched in 2019 as the anchor of a one-billion-dollar commitment by Eric and Wendy Schmidt in partnership with the [[Rhodes Trust]], identifies teenagers worldwide for lifelong support. The AI2050 program, conceived and cochaired by Schmidt and the technologist James Manyika, committed 125 million dollars over five years to researchers working to ensure society benefits from [[Artificial Intelligence]]. The venture also ran the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, quantum and science fellowships, and helped establish Convergent Research to build "focused research organizations."[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
These programs placed Schmidt money inside major universities and research institutions worldwide, including the [[University of Cambridge]], the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], and [[Stanford University]], through fellowships, named postdoctoral positions, and research funding. By concentrating on early-career talent, the venture built durable relationships with scientists and institutions across AI and the physical sciences.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The White House Science Office
|
||||
|
||||
A March 2022 Politico investigation reported that Schmidt Futures had paid the salaries of staff working inside the White House [[Office of Science and Technology Policy]] under its director [[Eric Lander]]. Its chief innovation officer [[Tom Kalil]] stayed on the Schmidt Futures payroll for four months while serving ostensibly as an unpaid consultant at the office, and the venture indirectly covered the salary of the office's chief of staff Marc Aidinoff for roughly six weeks. The office's general counsel Rachel Wallace raised significant ethical concerns about the arrangement given Schmidt's financial interests overlapping the office's portfolio.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Subsequent reporting, including by the [[Tech Transparency Project]], described a broader pattern in which Schmidt Futures money reached more than twenty science-policy positions across the [[Joe Biden]] administration, in part by routing fellows through outside groups such as the Federation of American Scientists and into agencies including the Department of Energy. Eric Schmidt called the original salary report "largely false." Senators including Chuck Grassley wrote to the science office and the General Services Administration seeking records on the personnel arrangements.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Consolidation into Schmidt Sciences
|
||||
|
||||
In 2024 Schmidt Futures folded its core scientific work into Schmidt Sciences, a new nonprofit founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt and led by the computer scientist [[Stuart Feldman]] as president and chief scientist. Schmidt Sciences organized its work into centers spanning AI and advanced computing, astrophysics and space, biosciences, climate, and cross-science programs, and it carried forward the AI2050 fellowships, naming new cohorts of senior and early-career fellows in 2024 and awarding millions of dollars in AI research grants in 2025.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2025 Schmidt Sciences announced a roughly 10-million-dollar venture to fund scientific research into AI safety problems, extending the couple's reach from talent funding into the technical AI-safety field. The Rise program continued under the joint Schmidt and Rhodes Trust partnership, while the rebrand separated the science programs from the Schmidt Futures name that had been damaged by the White House controversy.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Schmidt Futures," InfluenceWatch, on the 2017 founding by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the structure as an initiative of Futures Action Network LLC funded by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, chief executive Eric Braverman, and the program roster. https://www.influencewatch.org/organization/schmidt-futures/
|
||||
[^2]: "About" and "AI2050," Schmidt Sciences, on the 2024 establishment as the successor to Schmidt Futures' scientific programs, the 125-million-dollar AI2050 commitment over five years cochaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, the 2025 AI-safety research venture, and the founders Eric and Wendy Schmidt. https://www.schmidtsciences.org/about/
|
||||
[^3]: "Eric Braverman," InfluenceWatch, on his Clinton Foundation tenure (2013-2015), his leadership of Schmidt family philanthropy, and his role launching and running Schmidt Futures. https://www.influencewatch.org/person/eric-braverman/
|
||||
[^4]: "Second Cohort of AI2050 Senior Fellows Named By Schmidt Futures," Stony Brook University AI Innovation Institute, on AI2050's cochairs Eric Schmidt and James Manyika and the program's fellowship structure; and "Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust," on the Rise program as anchor of the one-billion-dollar commitment. https://ai.stonybrook.edu/about-us/News/second-cohort-ai2050-senior-fellows-named-schmidt-futures
|
||||
[^5]: "Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says story alleging his foundation indirectly paid White House science staffers is 'largely false,'" CNBC, March 29, 2022, on the Politico report, Tom Kalil's four months on the payroll, the six weeks of Marc Aidinoff's salary, Rachel Wallace's concerns, and Schmidt's denial. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/29/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-responds-to-white-house-related-allegations.html
|
||||
[^6]: "How Eric Schmidt built an expansive AI influence operation," Politico (Alex Thompson), March 28, 2022, on the OSTP salary arrangements and the Schmidt-tied staffing of the science office. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/28/google-eric-schmidt-white-house-00020712
|
||||
[^7]: "Schmidt Sciences awards $18M to researchers working to ensure AI benefits society," Schmidt Sciences, 2025, on the AI2050 fellow awards, the center structure, president Stuart Feldman, and the continuation of programs after the 2024 consolidation. https://www.schmidtsciences.org/2025-ai2050-fellows-announcement/
|
||||
59
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Seasteading Institute.md
Normal file
59
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Seasteading Institute.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Seasteading
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- PatriFriedman
|
||||
- SovereignIndividual
|
||||
- Libertarianism
|
||||
- Offshore
|
||||
- FrenchPolynesia
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- The Seasteading Institute
|
||||
- TSI
|
||||
summary: "The Seasteading Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit cofounded in 2008 by Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman (grandson of economist Milton Friedman) to establish autonomous, sovereign floating cities on the ocean as a physical instantiation of the sovereign-individual thesis, which pursued a floating-city project in French Polynesia before the territorial government cut ties in 2018."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-18
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Seasteading Institute is a [[501(c)(3)|501(c)(3)]] nonprofit cofounded in 2008 by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Patri Friedman|Patri Friedman]] (the grandson of the economist [[Milton Friedman|Milton Friedman]]) to establish autonomous, sovereign floating communities on the ocean. Thiel invested approximately 1.7 million dollars in the institute before resigning from its board in 2011. The institute pursued a floating-city project in [[French Polynesia|French Polynesia]] that reached a tentative territorial-government agreement around 2017 before the government cut ties in 2018 amid public backlash over what critics characterized as tech-billionaire colonization.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Sovereign-Individual Thesis Physicalized
|
||||
|
||||
The seasteading project is the physical instantiation of the [[The Sovereign Individual|Sovereign Individual]] thesis that Thiel has publicly cited as prophetic. The 1997 [[William Rees-Mogg|Rees-Mogg]] / [[James Dale Davidson|Davidson]] book argues that encryption and electronic commerce will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction. The seasteading project extends the thesis from the financial-jurisdictional escape (the book's focus) to the territorial escape: the construction of physical communities on the ocean outside the jurisdiction of any existing state.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Friedman brought the ideological frame through his family lineage. The grandson of Milton Friedman (the [[Chicago school of economics|Chicago school]] monetarist) and the son of [[David Friedman|David D. Friedman]] (the anarcho-capitalist theorist and author of *The Machinery of Freedom*), Friedman's seasteading proposal was the application of the family's anarcho-capitalist position to the problem of territorial jurisdiction. The floating-city concept was designed to permit the kind of jurisdictional competition the Sovereign Individual thesis predicts, with each seastead operating under its own chosen legal regime.[^3][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Founding and the Thiel Investment
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel and Friedman cofounded the Seasteading Institute in 2008. The *Cambridge Repository|Cambridge academic analysis* of seasteading documents the founding as a joint project of Friedman's policy framework and Thiel's capital. Thiel's initial investment was approximately 500,000 dollars, growing to approximately 1.7 million dollars cumulatively before his 2011 board resignation. The *Guardian* reported in January 2017 that Thiel's launch investment had made seasteading "the movement of the moment" in Silicon Valley libertarian circles.[^2][^3][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel resigned from the Seasteading Institute board in 2011, coinciding with the period of his documented [[Jeffrey Epstein]] relationship and the founding of the [[Neoreaction]]-patronage engagement with [[Curtis Yarvin]]. The seasteading project's institutional form (the sovereign floating community outside territorial jurisdiction) and the neoreactionary argument ([[Neocameralism|neocameralism]]: the sovereign territory as joint-stock corporate property) are the physical and political versions of the same thesis about the obsolescence of territorial nation-states.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The French Polynesia Project
|
||||
|
||||
The Seasteading Institute pursued a floating-city project in French Polynesia that reached a tentative agreement with the territorial government around 2017. The project proposed to build a pilot seastead in a sheltered lagoon under a special-economic-zone framework that would grant the seastead operational autonomy within French Polynesian territorial waters. [[Hawaii Public Radio|Hawaii Public Radio]] reported on the territorial government's agreement in January 2017, and the *Guardian* covered the proposal in detail.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The territorial government of French Polynesia cut ties with the Seasteading Institute in 2018 amid public backlash. *Business Insider* reported that the withdrawal was driven by local opposition to what critics characterized as tech-billionaire colonization, with the project framed as an external imposition on Polynesian territorial sovereignty rather than a voluntary partnership. The *Outline|Outline* covered the collapse under the headline "Tech bros told they're no longer allowed to colonize French Polynesia."[^1][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Offshore Legal Escape
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel obtained [[New Zealand]] citizenship in 2011 under an investor-visa provision without meeting the normal residency requirement, acquired a 193-hectare estate near [[Lake Wanaka]] in the South Island, and described New Zealand as "the future" in his citizenship application. The [[New York Times]] reported in 2018 that multiple Silicon Valley billionaires had acquired New Zealand properties as geographic insurance against systemic collapse.[^4][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The ideological root is the Sovereign Individual thesis that Thiel has publicly adopted. The 1997 Rees-Mogg / Davidson book argues that encryption and electronic commerce will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction. The seasteading project extends the thesis from financial escape to physical escape.[^4][^6][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
Friedman's family lineage supplies the anarcho-capitalist frame: his grandfather Milton Friedman founded the Chicago school of economics monetarist tradition, and his father David D. Friedman wrote *The Machinery of Freedom* (1973), the foundational anarcho-capitalist text arguing that all government functions, including courts and police, can be replaced by competing private providers. The seasteading project applies the Friedman-family ideological program to the physical construction of autonomous ocean-surface communities, funded by Thiel's capital.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "French Polynesia Cuts Ties With Libertarian Seasteading Institute." *Business Insider,* March 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3
|
||||
[^2]: "Seasteading: tech leaders' plans for floating city trouble French Polynesia." *The Guardian,* January 2, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/02/seasteading-peter-thiel-french-polynesia
|
||||
[^3]: "The Seasteading Institute." *Wikipedia.* For the founding, see also the Cambridge academic analysis of seasteading and international law.
|
||||
[^4]: For the Sovereign Individual thesis and Thiel's adoption of it, see the The Sovereign Individual page.
|
||||
[^5]: Rees-Mogg, William, and James Dale Davidson. *The Sovereign Individual.* Simon and Schuster, 1997.
|
||||
[^6]: For Patri Friedman's family lineage (Milton Friedman, David D. Friedman) and the anarcho-capitalist ideological frame, see the published Friedman family biographical record.
|
||||
[^7]: "Pacific News Minute: French Polynesia Agrees to 'SeaSteading' Proposal." *Hawaii Public Radio,* January 19, 2017. https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/pacific-news-minute/2017-01-19/pacific-news-minute-french-polynesia-agrees-to-seasteading-proposal-to-build-a-floating-city
|
||||
[^8]: "Tech bros told they're no longer allowed to colonize French Polynesia." *The Outline.* https://theoutline.com/post/3745/seasteading-institute-french-polynesia-peter-thiel
|
||||
[^9]: For Thiel's New Zealand citizenship and the broader offshore-legal-escape pattern, see the contemporaneous press coverage of the New Zealand investor-visa disclosure.
|
||||
41
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Southern Trust Company.md
Normal file
41
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Southern Trust Company.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- JeffreyEpstein
|
||||
- VirginIslands
|
||||
- SouthernTrust
|
||||
- TaxFraud
|
||||
- GovernmentCapture
|
||||
- ShellCompany
|
||||
summary: "Southern Trust Company was Jeffrey Epstein's U.S. Virgin Islands entity that obtained large territorial tax benefits by claiming to run a DNA-database and data-mining business the Virgin Islands later alleged it never actually conducted."
|
||||
location: "St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Southern Trust Company was a [[U.S. Virgin Islands]] corporation controlled by [[Jeffrey Epstein]], formed around 2012 and 2013 as the successor to his earlier territorial entity [[Financial Trust Company]]. It applied to the [[Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority]] in October 2012 for benefits under the [[Economic Development Commission]] program and received a ten-year incentive package, on the representation that it would build a DNA-database and data-mining, or "informatics," business. A January 2020 civil enforcement complaint by the territory's [[Denise George|Attorney General]] alleged that the company conducted no such business and existed to fund Epstein's criminal activity and properties, and the 2022 settlement with his estate required repayment of roughly 80 million dollars in the benefits it had obtained.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Formation and the Economic Development Commission Benefits
|
||||
|
||||
Epstein's territorial operation began with Financial Trust Company, which he relocated to the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1996 and used as the principal company managing his wealth and client investments. Southern Trust Company followed roughly a decade and a half later. The company applied to the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority in October 2012 and received a package running from February 1, 2013 through January 31, 2023 that included a 90 percent exemption from income taxes and 100 percent exemptions from gross-receipts, excise, and withholding taxes.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
To qualify, Southern Trust represented that it would operate a consulting service mining DNA and financial data for a global clientele, a database that, according to the application, would let pharmaceutical companies and physicians use Epstein's mathematical models to test drug protocols. The Economic Development Commission program conditions large tax reductions on a beneficiary maintaining a qualifying business and meeting employment and investment requirements in the territory. The Virgin Islands later alleged that the company never built or operated the represented informatics business.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The complaint and JPMorgan's later filings alleged that Southern Trust instead functioned as a conduit, processing payments to foreign women, covering credit cards, aircraft, and other instrumentalities, and compensating personnel within Epstein's network of entities. The same filings alleged that Epstein associates, including the office manager [[Cecile de Jongh]], wife of then-governor [[John de Jongh]], were employed by the company and worked to keep it in compliance so the benefits continued.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Fraud Allegation and the Settlement
|
||||
|
||||
The January 2020 complaint, brought in the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands as Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein under the territory's Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, alleged that Southern Trust fraudulently obtained its tax benefits by misrepresenting its business to the Economic Development Authority. The Attorney General amended the action to add the estate co-executors [[Darren Indyke]] and [[Richard Kahn]], Southern Trust Company, and other Epstein-created entities as co-defendants.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
On December 1, 2022 the territory announced a settlement with the Epstein estate for more than 105 million dollars in cash, plus half the proceeds of the sale of [[Little St. James]] and a payment of 450,000 dollars for environmental remediation at [[Great St. James]]. The settlement required the estate to return more than 80 million dollars in tax benefits that the territory said Southern Trust had obtained fraudulently to fund Epstein's criminal activity. The Attorney General Denise George stated that the settlement restored the faith of the people of the Virgin Islands that its laws would be enforced against those who break them.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The entity figured again in the territory's separate December 2022 suit against [[JPMorgan Chase]], which alleged that the bank serviced the Epstein network of companies, including Southern Trust and Financial Trust, while ignoring evidence of trafficking. That case settled in September 2023 for 75 million dollars to the Virgin Islands, and the bank separately paid 290 million dollars to Epstein's victims. The tax benefits at issue were scheduled to expire on January 31, 2023, the same period in which the territory's enforcement actions concluded.[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
[^1]: "U.S.V.I. Sues JPMorgan Chase for Facilitating Epstein Trafficking." *Tax Notes* (reproducing the complaint), December 2022; Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 1:22-cv-10904 (S.D.N.Y. 2022).
|
||||
[^2]: "U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Settles Sex Trafficking Case Against Estate of Jeffrey Epstein and Co-Defendants for Over $105 Million." *Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Justice,* December 1, 2022. https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/
|
||||
[^3]: "JPMorgan: EDA had 'little to no diligence' over Epstein tax benefits." *Virgin Islands Daily News,* 2023. https://www.virginislandsdailynews.com/news/jpmorgan-eda-had-little-to-no-diligence-over-epstein-tax-benefits/article_1fe46263-1561-5ec7-b5c7-c395bdc91665.html
|
||||
[^4]: "JPMorgan alleges wife of U.S. Virgin Islands' ex-governor aided Jeffrey Epstein's criminal activity." *NBC News,* May 24, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jpmorgan-alleges-ex-virgin-islands-first-lady-aided-jeffrey-epstein-rcna86365
|
||||
[^5]: Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, No. ST-20-CV-14 (V.I. Super. Ct., filed January 15, 2020), brought under the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 14 V.I.C. sections 600 to 614.
|
||||
[^6]: "U.S. Virgin Islands reaches a $105M settlement with Jeffrey Epstein's estate." *NPR,* December 1, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140096222/jeffrey-epsteins-estate-reaches-a-105m-settlement-with-the-u-s-virgin-islands ; "Epstein Estate to Pay U.S. Virgin Islands Over $105 Million." *Rolling Stone,* November 30, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jeffrey-epstein-estate-virgin-islands-settlement-1234639327/
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- SpecialCompetitiveStudiesProject
|
||||
- EricSchmidt
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- NationalSecurity
|
||||
- China
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Special Competitive Studies Project
|
||||
- SCSP
|
||||
summary: "The Special Competitive Studies Project is the nonprofit think tank Eric Schmidt founded in 2021 to continue his national-security commission's work on US competition with China in artificial intelligence and emerging technology."
|
||||
location: "Arlington, Virginia"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is a nonprofit think tank founded in October 2021 by [[Eric Schmidt]], the former [[Google]] chief executive, to advance United States competitiveness against [[China]] in [[Artificial Intelligence]] and other emerging technologies. It grew directly out of Schmidt's chairmanship of the [[National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence]], which ran from 2018 to 2021, and was consciously modeled on a Cold War studies project. It is a subsidiary of the [[Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation]], the Schmidt family's private foundation, and is led by [[Ylli Bajraktari]], who had been the national-security commission's executive director.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Cold War Model
|
||||
|
||||
Schmidt announced the project on October 5, 2021, framing it as a successor to the work of his AI commission, whose mandate expired that year. He named it after the Special Studies Project that [[Nelson Rockefeller]] commissioned in 1956 and that [[Henry Kissinger]] directed, a panel that assessed American strategy across military, economic, and social fronts during the early Cold War. The choice of name signaled the project's ambition to produce sweeping competitiveness strategy rather than narrow technical reports, and Schmidt argued the country needed to "think, organize and compete in significantly new ways."[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
SCSP assembled a bipartisan board drawn heavily from the defense and national-security establishment, including [[Robert Work]], the former deputy secretary of defense who had cochaired the AI commission with Schmidt, Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy national security adviser, [[Michèle Flournoy]], a former undersecretary of defense for policy, and [[Mac Thornberry]], the former Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The board was bipartisan and drawn almost entirely from the senior ranks of the defense and national-security establishment.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Mission and Reports
|
||||
|
||||
SCSP describes its mission as making recommendations to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness as AI and emerging technologies reshape national security, the economy, and society. It publishes strategy reports and "action plans" on AI, biotechnology, microelectronics, quantum computing, and 5G/6G networks, consistently arguing that the United States is in a technology contest with China that it risks losing without large public investment and a tighter alliance between Silicon Valley and the government. Its reports have cited specific industrial models, such as a Michigan distributed-manufacturing network, as templates the Defense Department should follow.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Reported financial figures for SCSP are limited because of its private foundation structure, with third-party estimates placing its annual revenue in the single-digit millions of dollars and its staff at several dozen employees. The organization registered as a lobbying presence and its leadership testified before Congress, with Schmidt appearing as its chair before a House committee in March 2023, giving the privately funded body a formal channel into legislative technology policy.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The AI Expo for National Competitiveness
|
||||
|
||||
In May 2024 SCSP held the inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, a two-day event on May 7 and 8 that drew government officials, allied governments, research institutions, and more than two hundred exhibitors. The data-analytics and defense contractor [[Palantir Technologies]] was the lead sponsor, and additional sponsors included Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Groq, and the China-focused intelligence firms Datenna and Strider.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The expo gave SCSP a recurring venue where defense contractors, AI companies, and national-security officials convened around the China-competition agenda the project promotes, and it returned in subsequent years under the AI+ Expo branding. Many of the technology and defense firms exhibiting stood to benefit from the increased government AI spending SCSP's reports advocate.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Who We Are," Special Competitive Studies Project, on the organization's status as a subsidiary of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, its leadership under Ylli Bajraktari, and its board including Robert Work, Nadia Schadlow, Michèle Flournoy, and Mac Thornberry. https://www.scsp.ai/about/who-we-are/
|
||||
[^2]: "Dr. Eric Schmidt announces Special Competitive Studies Project (Oct 5, 2021)," SCSP, on the October 5, 2021 announcement, the model on Nelson Rockefeller's 1956 Special Studies Project led by Henry Kissinger, the connection to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and Ylli Bajraktari as chief executive. https://www.scsp.ai/2021/10/dr-eric-schmidt-announces-special-competitive-studies-project-oct-5-2021-3/
|
||||
[^3]: "National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: 2021 Final Report," NSCAI, March 2021, on the commission's 2018-2021 run under Schmidt and Robert Work and its China-competition findings. https://www.nscai.gov/2021-final-report/
|
||||
[^4]: "Special Competitive Studies Project report spearheaded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls out Michigan-based Project DIAMOnD as distributed 3D printing model for DoD to follow," Project DIAMOnD, on SCSP's strategy reports and industrial-model recommendations. https://www.projectdiamond.org/news/special-competitive-studies-project-scsp-report-spearheaded-by-former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-calls-out-michigan-based-project-diamond-as-distributed-3d-printing-model-for-dod-to-follow
|
||||
[^5]: "Special Competitive Studies Project," Salary.com company overview, and Growjo, on the estimated annual revenue in the single-digit millions and the staff count. https://growjo.com/company/Special_Competitive_Studies_Project_-_SCSP
|
||||
[^6]: "Eric Schmidt, SCSP Chair," House Committee on Oversight and Accountability witness biography, March 8, 2023, on Schmidt's congressional testimony as chair of SCSP. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115432/witnesses/HHRG-118-GO12-Bio-SchmidtE-20230308.pdf
|
||||
[^7]: "Major Expo on National AI Competitiveness Addresses America's Readiness to Lead," SCSP, January 2024, on the inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness held May 7-8, 2024 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center with more than 200 exhibitors. https://www.scsp.ai/2024/01/major-expo-on-national-ai-competitiveness-addresses-americas-readiness-to-lead/
|
||||
[^8]: "Palantir Technologies Partners with SCSP's AI Expo on National Competitiveness," SCSP, February 2024, on Palantir as lead sponsor and the additional sponsors including Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Groq, Datenna, and Strider. https://www.scsp.ai/2024/02/palantir/
|
||||
|
|
@ -1,28 +1,67 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2025-07-22
|
||||
updated: 2025-07-22
|
||||
title: Stanford Research Institute
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Private
|
||||
- Research
|
||||
- Think Tank
|
||||
- USA
|
||||
- California
|
||||
description: The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was a key institution in the history of remote viewing, conducting research for the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- SRIInternational
|
||||
- ARPANET
|
||||
- AugmentationResearchCenter
|
||||
- MenloPark
|
||||
- RemoteViewing
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- SRI International
|
||||
- Stanford Research Institute
|
||||
summary: "Stanford Research Institute is the Menlo Park research institute, founded in 1946 and independent since 1970, that produced Douglas Engelbart's 1968 'Mother of All Demos,' the second ARPANET node, and the U.S. government's classified remote-viewing program under Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ."
|
||||
start: 1946
|
||||
location: "Menlo Park, California"
|
||||
summary: "The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) is a scientific research institute in Menlo Park, California, that became the center of the U.S. government's classified psychic research program in the early 1970s, where Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ conducted the foundational remote viewing experiments for the CIA."
|
||||
created: 2025-07-22
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) is a scientific research institute based in Menlo Park, California. In the early 1970s, SRI became the center of the U.S. government's secret psychic research program, which would eventually become known as the [[STARGATE PROJECT]].[^1]
|
||||
Stanford Research Institute, known since 1977 as SRI International, is a nonprofit contract research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1946 by trustees of Stanford University as a center of innovation serving regional and global industry. It became independent of Stanford in 1970. Over its history SRI developed bank check automation, the location study for Disneyland, [[Douglas Engelbart]]'s Augmentation Research Center and the 1968 demonstration later called the "Mother of All Demos," the second node of the ARPANET, the Shakey mobile robot, and the speech assistant that became Siri, and it also housed the government-funded parapsychology program run by [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI was a large and prestigious think tank, with close ties to Stanford University, and was primarily funded by government contracts, many of which were highly classified. This made it an ideal location for sensitive research into psychic phenomena.[^1]
|
||||
### The 1946 Founding and Early Contracts
|
||||
|
||||
The psi research at SRI was led by physicists [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]]. They conducted experiments with a number of psychics, including [[Ingo Swann]], [[Pat Price]], and [[Uri Geller]]. The research was funded by the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]] (DIA), and other government agencies.[^1]
|
||||
SRI was established in 1946 by [[Stanford University]] trustees to support the economic development of the American West and to give the university a vehicle for applied, contract-funded research serving industry. In its first decades it became one of the largest contract research organizations in the country, working across the physical sciences, engineering, economics, and operations research. Two early commercial projects became famous. In the 1950s, under contract to [[Bank of America]], SRI engineers built ERMA, the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting, and the magnetic-ink character recognition (MICR) printing on checks that remains the banking industry's standard for automated check processing.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI was responsible for developing many of the key concepts and techniques of remote viewing, including [[Coordinate Remote Viewing]] (CRV) and the use of outbounder teams. The research at SRI was instrumental in convincing the intelligence community that remote viewing had the potential to be a valuable intelligence-gathering tool. Despite initial skepticism from some within the scientific community, Puthoff and Targ were able to publish some of their findings in reputable scientific journals, lending a degree of credibility to the field.[^1]
|
||||
In April 1953 [[Walt Disney|Walt]] and [[Roy Disney]] hired the SRI economist Harrison Price to study the feasibility and siting of their proposed amusement park; Price's analysis led the Disneys to the Anaheim site where Disneyland opened in 1955, and SRI continued to advise the park as it expanded. Alongside this commercial work the institute took on a large volume of military and government contracts during the Cold War, the source of the controversy that later separated it from the university.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Augmentation Research Center
|
||||
|
||||
In 1957 the electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart joined SRI, where he pursued a conviction, set out in his October 1962 report *Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework*, that computers should be built to extend rather than replace human reasoning. That report, prepared for the [[U.S. Air Force]] Office of Scientific Research, drew the attention of [[J.C.R. Licklider]], the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Department's [[Advanced Research Projects Agency]] (ARPA), who funded Engelbart's new Augmentation Research Center in early 1963; [[NASA]] and ARPA support expanded after [[Robert Taylor]] took up the cause, first at NASA and then as IPTO director from 1965.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The center built the oN-Line System, or NLS, a working interactive computing environment running on an SDS 940 timesharing computer that combined the mouse (which Engelbart invented and patented), a chord keyset, bit-mapped screens, hierarchical document outlines, hypertext links, on-screen windows, and real-time collaborative editing among networked terminals. Engelbart's team included researchers such as [[Bill English]], who built the first mouse prototype, and the future [[Xerox PARC]] and Apple lineage of graphical-interface design traces directly to their work.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Mother of All Demos
|
||||
|
||||
On December 9, 1968, Engelbart presented NLS in a ninety-minute live demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, sitting on stage with a mouse and keyset while his team at SRI in Menlo Park appeared on a large projected screen over a leased microwave and video link. The session showed the mouse, hypertext, on-screen video conferencing, shared-screen collaborative editing, and windowed text, most of which would not reach ordinary computer users for another two decades. The journalist Steven Levy later popularized the name "the Mother of All Demos" for the event, which the Computer History Museum has called a foundational moment of interactive computing.[^3][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The demonstration was staged with the help of the countercultural impresario [[Stewart Brand]], who had produced [[Ken Kesey]]'s Trips Festival in San Francisco in 1966 and who launched the [[Whole Earth Catalog]] in the same autumn of 1968. Brand operated cameras and helped coordinate the video link from SRI, and the team used the Stanford Research Institute campus, a leased commercial video projector, and a homemade modem-and-microwave setup to carry the live images of the Menlo Park computer to the conference hall.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Second Node of the ARPANET
|
||||
|
||||
When ARPA built the [[ARPANET]], the packet-switched network that became the technical ancestor of the internet, SRI was chosen as the second of its original four nodes, after the [[University of California]], Los Angeles. On October 29, 1969, a UCLA student programmer, [[Charley Kline]], attempted to log in to Engelbart's SDS 940 at SRI over the new network; the system crashed after transmitting the first two letters of "login," so the first message ever sent across the ARPANET was the word "lo," with a full connection achieved about an hour later.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI's role in the early network extended past the first connection. From 1972 the institute operated the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET, the directory and registration service that maintained the master list of host names and addresses and the official documents of the growing network; [[Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler]] directed the NIC group at SRI from the early 1970s until 1989, and her team maintained the host table and the early domain registries that preceded the modern Domain Name System.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1970 Separation and Later Work
|
||||
|
||||
During the Vietnam War, student activists at Stanford protested the university's ties to SRI, whose contracts included classified military and counterinsurgency research, arguing that the relationship made the university part of the military-industrial complex. After demonstrations in the spring of 1969, including a sit-in at the SRI building and tear-gassing of protesters near the site in May 1969, the Stanford trustees voted to sever the institute, and SRI became a fully independent nonprofit in 1970, taking the name SRI International in 1977.[^1][^2] Its Artificial Intelligence Center, founded in 1966, built Shakey, the first mobile robot able to reason about its own actions, between 1966 and 1972; decades later the center's DARPA-funded CALO project spun off the company Siri in 2007, which Apple acquired in 2010.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Remote-Viewing Program
|
||||
|
||||
From 1972 to about 1995 SRI hosted a classified, government-funded parapsychology research program investigating "[[remote viewing]]," the claimed ability to perceive distant or hidden targets by extrasensory means, conducted for clients including the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] and the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]]. The physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ran the SRI experiments, working with subjects such as the artist [[Ingo Swann]], the former police officer [[Pat Price]], and the celebrity psychic [[Uri Geller]], and the program was one strand of the broader military and intelligence effort later consolidated under the name [[STARGATE PROJECT]].[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI developed several of the core techniques of the field, including [[Coordinate Remote Viewing]] (CRV) and the use of outbounder teams sent to randomly chosen locations for a viewer to describe. The institute's prestige and its heavy reliance on classified government contracts made it a fitting home for the sensitive work, and Puthoff and Targ published some of their results in reputable scientific journals, lending the field a measure of credibility that helped persuade parts of the intelligence community that remote viewing might serve as an intelligence-gathering tool.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "History, Leadership, and Values," About SRI International, on the 1946 founding by Stanford trustees as a center of innovation, the 1970 separation from Stanford, the ERMA and MICR banking work, and the institute's scale. https://www.sri.com/about-us/
|
||||
[^2]: "SRI International," institutional overview, on the 1946 founding to support West Coast economic development, the 1953 to 1955 Disneyland feasibility study by Harrison Price, the 1970 separation amid Vietnam-era protests over DARPA-funded military research, the 1977 rename to SRI International, Shakey the robot (1966 to 1972), and the Siri spin-off (2007) acquired by Apple (2010).
|
||||
[^3]: "Augmentation Research Center" and "Foundation of Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center," History of Information, on Engelbart joining SRI in 1957, the October 1962 report *Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework* for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Licklider's early-1963 ARPA funding, Robert Taylor's NASA and ARPA support, and the NLS system with the mouse, keyset, hypertext, and collaborative editing. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3136
|
||||
[^4]: Markoff, John, and contemporary accounts of the Augmentation Research Center, on Bill English building the first mouse prototype and the lineage from NLS to Xerox PARC and the graphical user interface; and "How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future," Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/
|
||||
[^5]: "The Mother of All Demos," accounts of the December 9, 1968 demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, and shared-screen editing, and Stewart Brand's role in staging and filming it; "Net@50," Computer History Museum. https://computerhistory.org/blog/net-50-did-engelbart-s-mother-of-all-demos-launch-the-connected-world/
|
||||
[^6]: "Charley Kline Sends the First Message Over the ARPANET," History of Information, on SRI as the second ARPANET node, the October 29, 1969 transmission of "lo," and the crash; and "Elizabeth J. Feinler," on her direction of SRI's Network Information Center for the ARPANET from the early 1970s until 1989 and her maintenance of the host table and early registries. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=1108
|
||||
[^7]: Standard accounts of the SRI remote-viewing program, 1972 to about 1995, funded by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and run by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff with subjects including Ingo Swann and Pat Price, as one strand of the program later known as Project Stargate. See the vault pages on Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, and Project Stargate.
|
||||
[^8]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997, on the SRI psychic-research program, the subjects including Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Uri Geller, the development of Coordinate Remote Viewing and outbounder protocols, and the publication of results in scientific journals.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Survival and Flourishing Fund.md
Normal file
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Survival and Flourishing Fund.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- SurvivalAndFlourishingFund
|
||||
- ExistentialRisk
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- Longtermism
|
||||
- JaanTallinn
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- SFF
|
||||
summary: "The Survival and Flourishing Fund is the grant-allocation vehicle backed chiefly by Jaan Tallinn that uses a software-assisted method called the S-process to direct money to existential-risk, AI-safety, and longtermist organizations, having organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts since 2019."
|
||||
location: "United States"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) is a grant-allocation vehicle, backed chiefly by the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]], that directs money to organizations concerned with the long-term survival and flourishing of sentient life. It uses a software-assisted allocation method called the S-process to convert the judgments of a rotating panel of evaluators into grant recommendations, and it has become one of the central funding channels of the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermist]] ecosystem, channeling money to [[Artificial Intelligence|AI]]-safety, biosecurity, and existential-risk groups. By its own accounting it has organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts across its rounds.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Origins and Funders
|
||||
|
||||
SFF grew out of Tallinn's earlier "Survival and Flourishing" donations, the loose label under which he had been giving to existential-risk and rationalist organizations, and it was formalized in 2019 with an initial grant of about 2 million dollars from the Organizational Grants Program of the [[Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative]] (BERI), itself funded by Tallinn's philanthropy. The structure let Tallinn delegate the evaluation of applicants to a committee rather than make every funding decision himself, while retaining final authority over whether to act on the recommendations.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Tallinn remains the dominant funder, but other donors have joined particular rounds, including the [[Ripple]] cofounder and cryptocurrency philanthropist [[Jed McCaleb]] and the [[Future of Life Institute]]. The fund's operations are run by Survival and Flourishing Corp (SFC), a separate entity that administers the rounds and the grant-making software; figures associated with its management have included the AI-safety researcher [[Andrew Critch]] and the software engineer Eric Rogstad. Annual distributions have ranged from the roughly 2 million dollars of the 2019 round to more than 40 million dollars in 2024.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The S-Process
|
||||
|
||||
The S-process (the "S" stands for "simulation") is the recurring procedure SFF runs once or twice a year to turn human judgment into dollar allocations. Each round recruits a panel of roughly four to twelve "recommenders" chosen by the funders, who review the applications and each express a marginal-value or utility function describing how much they think additional money to each organization is worth. A grant-making application then simulates the funding process, combining the recommenders' functions so that the system favors projects with enthusiastic individual champions rather than only broad consensus picks. SFF has credited the method's development to Andrew Critch, Tallinn, [[Oliver Habryka]], Kevin Arlin, and Jason Moggridge.[^1][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The mechanism is designed so that recommenders are given equal weight, in effect producing a synthetic average evaluator, while funders retain final say over whether to implement the output. In recent years SFF has run multiple parallel tracks within a single round; the 2025 round used twelve recommenders split across a six-person Main Track and two specialized three-person tracks named the Fairness Track and the Freedom Track, and it also offered matching pledges under which Tallinn committed to match outside donations at set rates. SFF separately operates a faster "Speculation Grants" program for time-sensitive funding between the main rounds.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Organizations Funded
|
||||
|
||||
SFF's grants have flowed to the core institutions of the AI-risk and existential-risk field. Recipients across its rounds have included the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]], the Future of Life Institute, and a wide range of newer AI-safety, governance, and biosecurity groups. The 2025 round alone recommended about 34.3 million dollars, with named grants including 2.035 million dollars to the AI Futures Project, 1.635 million dollars to the AI Policy Institute, 1.607 million dollars to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 1.5 million dollars to the biosecurity project SecureDNA, 1.311 million dollars to Lightcone Infrastructure, and 1.133 million dollars to Palisade Research.[^6][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
Other recurring beneficiaries have spanned technical alignment research, AI-policy advocacy, pandemic preparedness, and the rationalist community infrastructure that hosts much of this work, with individual grants typically ranging from around 10,000 dollars to well over a million dollars. Critics of the broader field have noted that a small number of donors, with Tallinn prominent among them, supply much of the money that funds the organizations scrutinizing advanced AI, a concentration that the S-process distributes but does not eliminate.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Survival and Flourishing Fund," official site, on its purpose, the 2019 BERI grant of about 2 million dollars funded by Jaan Tallinn, the roughly 150 million dollars organized across rounds, additional funders including Jed McCaleb and the Future of Life Institute, and management by Survival and Flourishing Corp. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/
|
||||
[^2]: "TIME100 Philanthropy: Jaan Tallinn," Time, 2026, on SFF directing roughly 150 million dollars to more than 300 projects and Tallinn as principal funder. https://time.com/collection/time100-philanthropy/2026/jaan-tallinn/
|
||||
[^3]: "Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)," LongtermWiki, on the fund's origins in Tallinn's earlier Survival and Flourishing donations and the BERI grant. https://ea-crux-project.vercel.app/knowledge-base/organizations/sff/
|
||||
[^4]: "Speculation Grants," Survival and Flourishing Fund, on the management by Survival and Flourishing Corp and the speculation-grant program. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/speculation-grants
|
||||
[^5]: "The S-Process," Survival and Flourishing Fund, on the simulation-based method, the four-to-twelve recommenders, the marginal-utility functions, the funders' final say, and the method's development by Andrew Critch, Jaan Tallinn, Oliver Habryka, Kevin Arlin, and Jason Moggridge. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/s-process
|
||||
[^6]: "SFF-2025 S-Process Recommendations Announcement," Survival and Flourishing Fund, 2025, on the twelve recommenders, the Main, Fairness, and Freedom tracks, the roughly 34.3 million dollars recommended, the named grants, and the matching pledges. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations
|
||||
[^7]: "2021 H2 S-Process Grant Round Recommendations," Survival and Flourishing Fund, on recurring recipients across rounds. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2021/h2/recommendations
|
||||
53
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Teneo Network.md
Normal file
53
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Teneo Network.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- TeneoNetwork
|
||||
- LeonardLeo
|
||||
- EvanBaehr
|
||||
- JoshHawley
|
||||
- DarkMoney
|
||||
- FederalistSociety
|
||||
- ConservativeMovement
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Teneo Network
|
||||
summary: "Teneo Network is a private, members-only conservative leadership organization founded in 2008 by Evan Baehr and Josh Hawley, chaired since 2021 by Leonard Leo, whose stated goal is to recruit, connect, and deploy influential conservatives across American institutions to, in Leo's words, 'crush liberal dominance.'"
|
||||
location: "United States"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Teneo Network is a private, members-only conservative leadership organization founded in 2008 by [[Evan Baehr]] and [[Josh Hawley]], the latter then a corporate lawyer and future U.S. senator from [[Missouri]]. [[Leonard Leo]], the longtime executive vice president of the [[Federalist Society]] and the principal architect of the conservative Supreme Court supermajority, joined the network as chairman in 2021. The organization's stated purpose, as described in internal materials obtained by [[ProPublica]] in March 2023, is to recruit, connect, and deploy influential conservatives across American law, finance, media, academia, and culture to, in Leo's framing, "crush liberal dominance" in each of those sectors. Teneo Network is a distinct entity from [[Teneo (consulting firm)|Teneo Holdings]], the unrelated global CEO-advisory and public-relations firm, and the two should not be conflated.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding by Baehr and Hawley
|
||||
|
||||
Evan Baehr and Josh Hawley founded Teneo Network in 2008, when both were in their late twenties and early thirties and moving through the conservative legal and policy networks. Baehr is a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative causes who had worked at the [[Heritage Foundation]] and in venture-backed political technology. Hawley was a corporate litigator at the [[Gibson Dunn]] firm who had clerked for Chief Justice [[John Roberts]] on the Supreme Court and who would later become Attorney General of Missouri (2017-2019) and U.S. senator from Missouri (2019-present).[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The 2008 founding predates both men's subsequent prominence and predates the formal involvement of Leonard Leo. *ProPublica* reported that the original concept was developed within the conservative legal-network orbit in which both founders moved, and the early membership drew on the Federalist Society chapters and the clerkship networks that feed the conservative legal movement. The founders' goal, as expressed in the internal documents *ProPublica* obtained, was to build a "Federalist Society for everything," extending the model of a members-only ideological network that had succeeded in the legal sector across the rest of American institutional life.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Leonard Leo's Chairmanship
|
||||
|
||||
Leonard Leo joined Teneo Network as chairman in 2021, bringing the financial and organizational infrastructure he had built through the Federalist Society, the [[Judicial Crisis Network]] (now the [[Concord Fund]]), and his broader dark-money operation. Leo's tenure as chairman coincided with a substantial expansion of the network's ambition: internal materials obtained by *ProPublica* described the goal of building networks of conservatives positioned to "roll back" liberal influence in Wall Street firms, media organizations, entertainment companies, and universities.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Leo came to the Teneo chairmanship from his role as the principal financier and organizer of the conservative judicial-selection project. Through the Judicial Crisis Network and a network of linked 501(c)(4) dark-money vehicles, Leo directed approximately one billion dollars into the project that produced the Supreme Court confirmations of [[Neil Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh]], and [[Amy Coney Barrett]] during the first Trump administration. The Teneo chairmanship extended that operational model from the courts into the broader institutional landscape.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The "Crush Liberal Dominance" Program
|
||||
|
||||
The internal Teneo materials *ProPublica* published in March 2023 laid out the network's program in direct terms. Teneo events, captured on video obtained by *ProPublica*, featured Leo and other principals describing the goal of placing conservatives in positions of influence across corporate America, entertainment, media, and finance, with the explicit aim of reversing the liberal dominance the network diagnosed in those sectors. The framing was that the conservative movement had succeeded in the courts through the Federalist Society model and should now apply the same model, with the same disciplined long-horizon investment, to the rest of American institutional life.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
[[NPR]] reported in November 2024 that Leo had publicly confirmed the program in an interview, describing the intent to disrupt liberal dominance across sectors. The *Esquire*, *Salon*, and WNYC *On the Media* coverage extended the *ProPublica* reporting into analysis of how the dark-money infrastructure funded the broader institutional project. The Bradley Impact Fund, a conservative philanthropic vehicle, hosted a Teneo conversation describing the network as "a national, members-only leadership organization that exists to recruit, connect, and deploy the most talented and influential conservatives."[^2][^3][^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Thiel Adjacency
|
||||
|
||||
The Teneo-[[Peter Thiel]] connection runs through Evan Baehr's orbit rather than through Thiel's formal cofounding role. *ProPublica* reported that the Teneo concept was developed in part through Baehr's exposure to the Thiel network, and the conservative legal-and-policy infrastructure Teneo was built to extend overlaps with the donor and operative networks that also support the Thiel political projects (the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values]] funding of [[JD Vance]], the [[Per Aspera Policy]] dark-money vehicle). Josh Hawley's own trajectory from Teneo cofounder to elected office tracks the pattern the JD Vance page documents for the broader Thiel-network recruitment of political entrants.[^1][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel is not listed in the *ProPublica* record as a Teneo cofounder, contrary to some secondary reporting that has described him in that role. The connection is documented at the level of overlapping donor and operative networks, shared ideological framing around the rollback of liberal institutional dominance, and the shared infrastructure of dark-money vehicles that fund both the Teneo program and the Thiel political projects.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Inside the 'Private and Confidential' Conservative Group That Promises to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *ProPublica,* March 15, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents
|
||||
[^2]: "Federalist Society's Leonard Leo Wants to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *NPR Morning Edition,* November 24, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/24/nx-s1-5199049/federalist-society-conservative-supreme-court
|
||||
[^3]: "Leonard Leo Wants to Use His Dark Money to Remake American Culture." *Esquire,* 2023. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43336330/teneo-leonard-leo/
|
||||
[^4]: "A Federalist Society for All Things: Dark Money Enters the Culture Wars." *Salon,* March 18, 2023. https://www.salon.com/2023/03/18/a-federalist-society-for-all-things-dark-money-enters-the-culture/
|
||||
[^5]: Bradley Impact Fund. "In Their Words: A Conversation with Teneo." https://www.bradleyimpactfund.org/blog/in-their-words-a-conversation-with-teneo
|
||||
[^6]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/
|
||||
103
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Zizians.md
Normal file
103
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Zizians.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Zizians
|
||||
- Rationalism
|
||||
- Cult
|
||||
- Violence
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- Veganism
|
||||
- Transhumanism
|
||||
summary: "The Zizians are a small group led by the computer programmer Jack LaSota that splintered from the Bay Area rationalist movement around an idiosyncratic theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, and AI-apocalypse decision theory, and that has been tied to six deaths across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including the killing of a Border Patrol agent that produced a federal death-penalty prosecution."
|
||||
location: "Vallejo, California; San Francisco Bay Area"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Zizians are a small ideological group that formed around the computer programmer [[Jack LaSota]], who wrote under the persona "Ziz," as a splinter of the Bay Area [[Rationalist Community]] in the late 2010s. The group fused a borrowed rationalist decision theory with an original theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, anarchism, and transhumanism, and several of its members acted on the doctrine with lethal violence. Between 2022 and 2025 the group was tied to six deaths across [[California]], [[Pennsylvania]], and [[Vermont]], including the January 2025 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]], which produced the first federal death-penalty prosecution brought under the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration. The members were recruited almost entirely from the rationalist and [[Effective Altruism]] milieu around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI) and the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] (CFAR), most of them young, highly educated, transgender, and preoccupied with the danger of artificial intelligence.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Origins in the Rationalist Movement
|
||||
|
||||
LaSota, born and raised in [[Fairbanks]], [[Alaska]], studied computer science at the [[University of Alaska Fairbanks]], briefly pursued postgraduate work at the [[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign]], and interned at [[NASA]] before relocating to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] around 2013 to involve herself with MIRI and CFAR. She had been an avid reader of [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s writing and entered the community as an acolyte before turning into one of its sharpest critics, accusing MIRI and CFAR of "ethical hypocrisy" and of failing to live up to the moral demands of their own rationalist doctrine. By the mid-2010s she had begun publishing dense blog posts that extended rationalist decision theory into claims about gender, cognition, and morality.[^1][^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
LaSota began blogging under the persona "Ziz" around 2016, debating AI safety and logical paradoxes on [[LessWrong]] before moving to her own site with longer posts on technology, gender identity, and cognition. CFAR co-founder [[Anna Salamon]] later characterized LaSota as someone who "wanted to feel special" but felt outshone in a Bay Area scene crowded with technical talent, and described the circle's turn toward extremity as an attempt to become "main characters" by other means. The formal split came in 2018, when rationalist organizations rejected the hemisphere theory and LaSota broke with the community that had drawn her west.[^2][^17][^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Rationalist Fleet
|
||||
|
||||
By 2017 LaSota had gathered a small circle of followers, largely transgender and gender-nonconforming rationalists, to establish what they called the "Rationalist Fleet," a floating intentional community organized around anarchic self-sufficiency, cognitive liberation, and total veganism. The group acquired a repurposed World War II tugboat, the Caleb (formerly the Panameta), and sailed it from Alaska to California. When the vessel's upkeep collapsed, members moved into trailers and converted box trucks along the California coast, the living arrangement that later brought them to the [[Vallejo]] property of [[Curtis Lind]].[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The fleet was conceived as a way to live outside the conventional economy while devoting full attention to averting an AI catastrophe, and members pooled funds to keep the boats running. The scheme placed a cluster of people with no maritime experience aboard aging vessels that demanded constant maintenance, and the financial and physical strain pushed the group ashore within a few years. The truck-and-trailer encampments that followed kept the community mobile and off conventional leases, a pattern that recurred through the Vallejo lot in 2022 and the box trucks parked near [[Frostburg]], Maryland, where members were arrested in 2025.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Ideology
|
||||
|
||||
LaSota's central theory held that the brain's two hemispheres house separate personalities with their own genders and moral alignments, a "domineering, analytic" masculine left and an "empathetic, intuitive" feminine right, and that each hemisphere could be independently good or evil. She sorted people's mental "cores" into categories of "nongood," "single good," and "double good" according to how completely they aligned with her moral system. She counted very few people, herself among them, as "double good"; the associate [[Gwen Danielson]] was rated only "single good," which in the group's terms meant she could not be fully trusted and had to be watched.[^1][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The group practiced "unihemispheric sleep," an attempt to rest one brain hemisphere while keeping the other awake, which LaSota described as a way to "jailbreak" the mind and deepen a member's commitment to the cause. Members also practiced "debucketing," the deliberate unlearning of inherited social categories in order to reach what LaSota framed as unmediated moral insight. The moral framework took the concept of "heroic responsibility" from Yudkowsky's fiction and combined it with the timeless-decision-theory argument that one should act on universal principles rather than causal pragmatism, so that ordinary ethical compromises became, in the group's account, existential betrayals. LaSota wore black robes and described herself as "Sith," after the malevolent order in the [[Star Wars]] films, framing a self-consciously adversarial morality against a world the group held to be irredeemably complicit in animal killing and on the verge of collapse through artificial-intelligence misalignment.[^1][^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
In February 2018 a follower, [[Maia Pasek]], who used the name "Squirrel," died by suicide after intense involvement with LaSota and the group's psychological practices. Outside observers attributed the death to the sleep-deprivation experiments; LaSota instead presented it as evidence of the transformative power of the method.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
LaSota's account folded the death into the hemisphere doctrine, holding that Pasek's two hemispheres had reached opposing moral verdicts and that one had killed the other, a framing that recast a suicide as a logical outcome of the practice rather than a casualty of it. The group treated the experiments as a kind of moral and cognitive boot camp, and the willingness to read a member's death as confirmation rather than refutation became a feature of how the circle processed later violence and casualties among its own.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2019 CFAR Break and the Name
|
||||
|
||||
In November 2019 LaSota, [[Emma Borhanian]], [[Alexander Leatham]] (who used the name "Somni"), and Danielson, among others, appeared in [[Guy Fawkes mask|Guy Fawkes masks]] and black robes to protest a CFAR alumni retreat at [[Occidental]] in [[Sonoma County]], blocking the entrances and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four people were arrested. CFAR had already barred LaSota and Danielson from its events that year, and the wider rationalist movement publicly distanced itself from the circle. The label "Zizians" was coined by online commentators warning the rationalist scene about LaSota; the group never adopted the name itself. One participant in the standoff was still being sentenced for it as late as April 2026.[^1][^3][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The protest framed CFAR as having concealed sexual misconduct within rationalist organizations, the same grievance of institutional hypocrisy that had driven LaSota's earlier break, now escalated into a masked physical blockade. The arrests gave the group its first criminal exposure and tied several of the people later central to the killings, Borhanian, Leatham, and Danielson, into a single documented incident years before the violence. The slow pace of the prosecution, with a defendant still facing sentencing in 2026 for conduct in 2019, kept the standoff procedurally alive across the entire arc of the later cases.[^1][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Faked Deaths
|
||||
|
||||
Disappearance and feigned death recur in the group's history. Danielson stopped appearing for court hearings in April 2019, and a lawyer later suggested she might be dead. In August 2022 LaSota staged her own death, leaving the impression that she had drowned after going off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and remained at large under that cover before resurfacing in [[Philadelphia]] in 2023. She was wanted in two states by the time she was arrested in 2025.[^5][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The 2022 disappearance followed a specific script: the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen from a boat in the bay, no body was recovered, and an obituary was published, leaving an official record of a drowning that let her drop out of pending Vallejo proceedings. The recruitment pattern that fed the group depended on similar severances on the members' side. Several younger recruits cut contact with their families before joining, sending final messages and changing phone numbers, so that the group absorbed people who had already vanished from their previous lives, a dynamic that surfaced again in the 2024 disappearance of [[Teresa Youngblut]].[^3][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Vallejo Killings
|
||||
|
||||
By autumn 2022 LaSota and several followers were living in vehicles on a Vallejo lot owned by Curtis Lind, an octogenarian landlord who rented them space. On November 15, 2022, a dispute over unpaid rent escalated when members attacked Lind with a sword, impaling him and costing him an eye; Lind drew a handgun and shot and killed Emma Borhanian, a longtime LaSota collaborator. Leatham and [[Suri Dao]] were charged with Borhanian's murder and the attempted murder of Lind; Leatham later attempted to escape custody twice.[^2][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
On January 17, 2025, Lind was killed near the site of the 2022 attack, stabbed with his throat cut, shortly before he was due to testify against the members charged in that case. [[Maximilian Snyder]], a former [[University of Oxford]] student connected to the group, was charged by [[Solano County]] prosecutors with Lind's murder, which prosecutors alleged was meant to prevent his testimony.[^9][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Pennsylvania Killings
|
||||
|
||||
On December 31, 2022, [[Richard Zajko]] and [[Rita Zajko]] were shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of [[Michelle Zajko]], a member of the group; Michelle was questioned and treated as a person of interest but was not charged in the killings, and she has publicly denied involvement. Investigators have linked a firearm tied to Michelle Zajko to subsequent incidents involving the group.[^3][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The couple, ages 72 and 69, were not found until a January 2, 2023 welfare check; Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, and two 9mm shell casings were left at the scene with no weapon recovered. A neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania investigators determined that ammunition matching the scene had been purchased by Michelle Zajko, who acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, and in early 2023 LaSota was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. The case remained unsolved into 2026, with the WHYY and AP timelines noting that no one had been charged in the deaths themselves.[^11][^16][^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Vermont Killing
|
||||
|
||||
On January 20, 2025, Border Patrol agents stopped a vehicle on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, near the Canadian border, carrying Teresa Youngblut and [[Felix Bauckholt]], a German national and quantitative trader who used the name "Ophelia." A shootout followed in which Agent David Maland was killed and Bauckholt was shot dead; Youngblut was wounded. Federal prosecutors allege Youngblut fired the shot that killed Maland. The killing drew national attention to the group and set off the arrests that followed.[^3][^12]
|
||||
|
||||
The pair had drawn law enforcement attention days earlier: a hotel employee in Lyndonville reported that they had checked in around January 14 wearing all-black tactical clothing and protective gear, including a holstered firearm, which prompted periodic surveillance, and investigators observed them in tactical dress in downtown Newport on January 19. According to the FBI affidavit, Youngblut got out of the vehicle during the stop and fired at agents without warning, using a .40-caliber Glock 23, while Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon before being shot. A search of the vehicle turned up multiple firearms, .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point rounds, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, handheld radios, and roughly a dozen electronic devices, several wrapped in aluminum foil. Maland died at North Country Hospital and Youngblut was treated at Dartmouth Hitchcock.[^12][^20]
|
||||
|
||||
### Arrests and Prosecutions
|
||||
|
||||
On February 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested with Michelle Zajko and [[Daniel Blank]] in Allegany County, [[Maryland]], after a property owner near Frostburg reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; investigators found LaSota in possession of a GM6 Lynx .50-caliber rifle, an HS Produkt Hellcat 9mm handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and the three were ordered held without bail. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted LaSota on June 20, 2025 as a fugitive in possession of firearms and ammunition, a charge carrying up to fifteen years.[^13][^21]
|
||||
|
||||
On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a competency evaluation for LaSota after defense attorney Gary Proctor reported that she had refused to speak with a doctor brought to the jail and had told a prior hearing that the judge led an "organized crime ring," answering a question about her age with "Timeless." LaSota's lawyers separately rejected the "Zizian" and "cult" labels in court filings and accused the Department of Justice of misgendering their client by using her former name and male pronouns. She remained held at the Allegany County Detention Center pending the evaluation.[^14][^22]
|
||||
|
||||
Youngblut was charged in federal court in Vermont; a superseding indictment in August 2025 added the murder of Maland and the assault of two other agents, and the Department of Justice filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, the first such pursuit of the second Trump administration. She pleaded not guilty in September 2025, and proceedings continued into 2026. Snyder was charged by Solano County with Lind's murder, and Leatham and Dao with the 2022 killing of Borhanian and the attempted murder of Lind. By early 2026 at least seven people associated with the group were fighting charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The six deaths attributed to the group are Borhanian and Lind in California, Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania, and Maland and Bauckholt in Vermont.[^3][^15][^16]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/
|
||||
[^2]: "Zizians," World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, November 7, 2025; scholarly profile of the group's origins, the Rationalist Fleet, ideology, and timeline. https://wrldrels.org/2025/11/07/zizians/
|
||||
[^3]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont
|
||||
[^4]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/
|
||||
[^5]: "'Zizian' namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states," *Open Vallejo,* January 31, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/
|
||||
[^6]: "How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?" *NBC News,* 2025, on the hemisphere theory, the "single good" and "double good" classifications, and the group's composition. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309
|
||||
[^7]: "Woman sentenced for 2019 Sonoma County standoff involving cultlike Zizians group linked to killings," *The Press Democrat,* April 23, 2026. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2026/04/23/sonoma-county-woman-sentenced-for-2019-standoff-zizians/
|
||||
[^8]: "Key figure in 'Zizian' group tied to Vermont border patrol shooting faked death in 2022 and is wanted in 2 states," *VTDigger,* February 2, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/02/02/key-figure-in-zizian-group-tied-to-vermont-border-patrol-shooting-faked-death-in-2022-and-is-wanted-in-2-states/
|
||||
[^9]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/
|
||||
[^10]: "Federal grand jury indicts Zizian namesake with Vallejo ties," *Open Vallejo,* June 20, 2025, on the Snyder charge and the Lind killing. https://openvallejo.org/2025/06/20/federal-grand-jury-indicts-zizian-namesake-with-vallejo-ties/
|
||||
[^11]: "Michelle Zajko case: Member of cultlike Zizian group says she did not kill her parents in Delaware County," 6abc Philadelphia, 2025. https://6abc.com/post/michelle-zajko-case-member-zizian-group-says-she-did-not-kill-parents-delaware-county/16181890/
|
||||
[^12]: "Prosecutors file notice they will seek the death penalty against Teresa Youngblut in border agent killing," *VTDigger,* August 14, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/08/14/grand-jury-returns-new-indictment-against-teresa-youngblut-for-allegedly-killing-border-agent/
|
||||
[^13]: U.S. Department of Justice, District of Maryland, "Alaskan Individual Charged with Possessing Firearms and Ammunition as a Fugitive from Justice," June 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/alaskan-individual-charged-possessing-firearms-and-ammunition-fugitive-justice
|
||||
[^14]: "Judge orders competency evaluation for alleged 'Zizian' cult leader Ziz LaSota," *The Baltimore Banner,* November 2025. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/zizian-cult-leader-competency-evaluation-PXYELJW3NBB5HOUWG6MA4U4E3I/
|
||||
[^15]: "Prosecutors seek death penalty against Zizians member charged with murdering Vermont border agent," Associated Press, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutors-seek-death-penalty-fatal-shooting-border-patrol-agent/
|
||||
[^16]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/
|
||||
[^17]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the 2016 start of the "Ziz" blog and the 2018 split from the rationalist movement. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont
|
||||
[^18]: "Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley," Ian Leslie, 2025, on Anna Salamon's account of LaSota wanting to "feel special" and the group's pursuit of being "main characters." https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/rationalist-cults-of-silicon-valley
|
||||
[^19]: "Member of Zizians, cultlike group of AI-obsessed vegans, says she didn't kill her parents," *NBC News,* 2025, on the gunshot wounds, 9mm casings, and ammunition purchase. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/member-zizians-cultlike-group-ai-obsessed-vegans-says-didnt-kill-paren-rcna201537
|
||||
[^20]: "Court Docs Provide New Details on Border Patrol Shooting," *Seven Days,* January 2025, on the Lyndonville hotel, the surveillance, the Glock 23, and the gear recovered. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/court-docs-provide-new-details-on-border-patrol-shooting-42735984/
|
||||
[^21]: "Federal authorities bring firearms charge against alleged leader of Zizians," *VTDigger,* June 20, 2025, on the Frostburg arrest and the federal indictment. https://vtdigger.org/2025/06/20/federal-authorities-bring-firearms-charge-against-alleged-leader-of-zizians/
|
||||
[^22]: "Competency review ordered for Jack 'Ziz' LaSota, who rejects 'Zizian' and 'cult' labels," Associated Press via *The Boston Globe,* March 12, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/12/nation/jack-lasota-zizan-leader-mental-competency/
|
||||
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thiel Fellowship.md
Normal file
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thiel Fellowship.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- ThielFellowship
|
||||
- ThielFoundation
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
- Recruitment
|
||||
- Education
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Thiel Fellowship
|
||||
- Thiel Fellows
|
||||
- 20 Under 20
|
||||
summary: "The Thiel Fellowship is a program of the Thiel Foundation, founded in 2010 by Peter Thiel, that awards 250,000 dollars over two years to people aged 22 or younger on the condition that they skip or stop out of college to pursue a venture, and whose alumni include Vitalik Buterin and other founders who entered the Thiel commercial network through the program."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California (Thiel Foundation)"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-17
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Thiel Fellowship is a program of the [[Thiel Foundation]], founded by [[Peter Thiel]] in 2010 (originally as "20 Under 20"), that awards 250,000 dollars over two years to people aged 22 or younger on the condition that they skip or stop out of college to pursue a venture. The fellowship is the entry point into the Thiel commercial network for a cohort of founders who were recruited into the network as teenagers or early-twenties entrants, before they had passed through the conventional university and career pipeline. Notable alumni include [[Vitalik Buterin]] (the creator of [[Ethereum]]), [[Ritesh Agarwal]], [[Laura Deming]], [[Austin Russell]], and [[Dale Stephens]].[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the Anti-University Thesis
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel announced the fellowship in 2010 as "20 Under 20," with the explicit framing that university education had become overpriced, risk-averse, and credential-oriented, and that the most talented young people would produce more value by building ventures outside the university than by completing degrees. The original cohort of twenty fellows under the age of twenty was selected in 2011. The award was initially 100,000 dollars over two years; it has since been raised to 250,000 dollars over two years, and the program has shifted from a strict "drop out" requirement to a "skip or stop out" formulation that permits fellows to pause rather than permanently leave their studies.[^1][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The anti-university thesis is continuous with the broader Thiel argument that credentialism and institutional consensus have captured the conventional education and career pipeline. The fellowship's institutional expression of that thesis is the offer of capital and network access in exchange for exit from the institution, which inverts the standard model in which the institution is the gateway to capital and network. The fellowship has run continuously since 2010 and has selected roughly 20 to 30 fellows per cohort.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Notable Alumni and the Network Effect
|
||||
|
||||
The fellowship's alumni roster is the program's output. Vitalik Buterin was a 2014 fellow who used the period to develop and launch Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Austin Russell founded [[Luminar Technologies]], the autonomous-vehicle lidar company, and became a billionaire on its 2021 public listing. Laura Deming founded the longevity-research venture fund [[Longevity Fund]]. Ritesh Agarwal founded the hospitality company [[Oyo Rooms]]. Dale Stephens founded [[UnCollege]], an organization promoting alternatives to university education.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The alumni network provides continuing access to the Thiel commercial orbit. Fellows receive access to the Thiel Foundation's network of founders, investors, and scientists, and the fellowship cohort itself forms a peer network that persists past the two-year award period. Fellows have gone on to raise venture funding from [[Founders Fund]] and adjacent Thiel-network investors. The fellowship identifies and capitalizes talent before the conventional pipeline does.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Recruitment Layer
|
||||
|
||||
The fellowship identifies high-potential individuals in their teens and early twenties, supplies them with capital and network access, and brings them into the commercial, convening, and ideological infrastructure of the Thiel orbit at an age at which their trajectories are still forming. The approach is continuous with the [[JD Vance]] recruitment (capital and mentorship supplied at the career-formation stage) and the [[Teneo Network]] model of identifying and placing ideological allies across institutional sectors.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The fellowship operates alongside the other documented Thiel-network recruitment and convening vehicles: the Founders Fund portfolio companies, the [[Dialog]] conference, [[Hereticon]], the [[Per Aspera Policy]] political-action vehicle, and the Teneo Network conservative-leadership layer. The fellowship is the earliest-stage layer, recruiting at the point of educational exit rather than at the point of commercial or political entry.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Thiel Fellowship. Official program site. https://thielfellowship.org/
|
||||
[^2]: "Gen Z and millennial founders who dropped out for the fellowship." *Fortune,* August 16, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/08/16/gen-z-millennial-founders-college-dropout-entrepreneurs-peter-thiel-fellowship/
|
||||
[^3]: "Thiel Fellowships don't require students to drop out." *Inside Higher Ed,* November 13, 2012. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/13/thiel-fellowships-dont-require-students-drop-out
|
||||
[^4]: For the original 2010 "20 Under 20" announcement and the founding program design, see contemporaneous press coverage and the Thiel Foundation's own historical materials.
|
||||
[^5]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
|
||||
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thinking Machines Lab.md
Normal file
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thinking Machines Lab.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- ThinkingMachinesLab
|
||||
- MiraMurati
|
||||
- OpenAI
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- VentureCapital
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Thinking Machines
|
||||
summary: "Thinking Machines Lab is the AI research company Mira Murati founded in 2025 with a team drawn heavily from OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and adviser Bob McGrew, which raised a roughly 2-billion-dollar seed round at a 12-billion valuation reported as one of the largest seed rounds ever."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial-intelligence research company founded by [[Mira Murati]], the former chief technology officer of [[OpenAI]], which emerged from stealth in February 2025. Its founding team and early staff were drawn heavily from OpenAI, including the cofounder and reinforcement-learning pioneer [[John Schulman]] as chief scientist and the research executive Barret Zoph as chief technology officer, with the former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew joining as an adviser. In July 2025 the company closed a seed round of roughly 2 billion dollars at a 12-billion-dollar valuation, a figure widely described as among the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding and the OpenAI Lineage
|
||||
|
||||
Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and spent the following months recruiting from the company's senior research ranks. By the time Thinking Machines Lab came out of stealth in February 2025 it had assembled a founding cohort of around 38 people, roughly half of them former OpenAI employees. Beyond Schulman and Zoph, the early staff included Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz, all OpenAI researchers, and the roster reflected a broader migration of post-training and alignment talent out of OpenAI in 2024 and 2025. Schulman had himself left OpenAI for [[Anthropic]] in August 2024 before joining Murati's lab.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The company positioned itself around making advanced AI more customizable and more understandable, with Murati saying it would share scientific work to help the research community grasp how frontier systems behave. She told investors and press that the lab would unveil its first product within months and would include "a significant open source offering" aimed at researchers and startups building their own models. In April 2025 the lab added several prominent former OpenAI figures as advisers, among them Bob McGrew, who had been OpenAI's chief research officer until September 2024, and the former OpenAI researcher Alec Radford.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Seed Round and Investors
|
||||
|
||||
In July 2025 Thinking Machines Lab raised approximately 2 billion dollars in a seed round that valued the company at 12 billion dollars, up from a 10-billion figure reported in June. The round was led by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], with participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street. Raising 2 billion dollars at the seed stage, before any product, placed the deal among the largest initial financings ever recorded in the venture industry.[^1][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Meta Platforms reportedly explored an acquisition of the company before any formal offer materialized, and Google Cloud signed on to supply infrastructure for the lab's models. By early 2026 Bloomberg reported that Thinking Machines Lab was in talks for a new round that would value it near 50 billion dollars, even as the company faced the same talent competition it had drawn from: in January 2026 two of its cofounders were reported to be returning to OpenAI.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round," *TechCrunch,* July 15, 2025, on the roughly 2-billion seed round, the 12-billion valuation, the Andreessen Horowitz lead, the Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street participation, and the open-source plans. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-lab-is-worth-12b-in-seed-round/
|
||||
[^2]: "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic," *Fortune,* February 6, 2025, on the founding, Schulman as chief scientist, and the OpenAI-derived team. https://www.fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic
|
||||
[^3]: "Inside Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's New AI Startup," Built In, on the February 2025 launch, the 38-person founding cohort, the OpenAI lineage, and the cofounders including Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz. https://builtin.com/articles/what-is-thinking-machines-lab
|
||||
[^4]: "OpenAI's former chief research officer joins Mira Murati's AI startup," reporting on Bob McGrew joining as an adviser in March 2025 and his prior role as OpenAI chief research officer. *TechCrunch,* April 8, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/08/mira-muratis-ai-startup-gains-prominent-ex-openai-advisers
|
||||
[^5]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Hits $12B Valuation in Seed Round," Financial IT, on the valuation rise from 10 to 12 billion, the investor roster, and the Meta acquisition interest and Google Cloud infrastructure. https://financialit.net/news/fundraising-news/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-hits-12b-valuation-seed-round
|
||||
[^6]: "Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab is losing two of its co-founders to OpenAI," *TechCrunch,* January 14, 2026, on the near-50-billion valuation talks and the cofounder departures. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/mira-muratis-startup-thinking-machines-lab-is-losing-two-of-its-co-founders-to-openai
|
||||
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Towers Financial Corporation.md
Normal file
39
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Towers Financial Corporation.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags: [Organization, TowersFinancial, StevenHoffenberg, JeffreyEpstein, PonziScheme, SEC, Fraud, Finance]
|
||||
alias: ["Towers Financial", "TFC"]
|
||||
summary: "Manhattan debt-collection and securities firm run by Steven Hoffenberg that collapsed in 1993 and was prosecuted as a roughly 475 million dollar Ponzi scheme, with Jeffrey Epstein documented as a consultant."
|
||||
location: New York, New York
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Towers Financial Corporation was a debt-collection and securities firm based in Manhattan and controlled by [[Steven Hoffenberg]]. Between roughly 1988 and 1993 it sold promissory notes and bonds to thousands of investors while operating as a Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed in 1993 following action by the [[Securities and Exchange Commission]]. [[Jeffrey Epstein]] worked at the firm as a consultant during this period.
|
||||
|
||||
### Business Model
|
||||
|
||||
Towers Financial grew out of a debt-collection enterprise Steven Hoffenberg started in New York in the 1970s, reportedly from a small initial investment, that bought delinquent accounts at steep discounts and pursued the full balances.[^4] The firm presented itself as a debt-collection company that purchased portfolios of distressed receivables, paying a small fraction of face value for debts that sellers regarded as largely uncollectible.[^1] The receivables included money owed to hospitals, banks and telephone companies, and the company described an expanding base of healthcare and commercial debt that, it claimed, drove annual revenues toward one billion dollars by 1993.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
To finance these operations the company raised capital from investors by issuing unsecured promissory notes and other securities, marketing them as backed by the receivables portfolios.[^2] In practice, prosecutors and regulators later found, the represented collateral and returns were not supported by the firm's actual collections.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Towers also acquired two Illinois insurance companies, United Fire Insurance Co. and Associated Life Insurance Co., in 1987, which served as additional funding sources for the firm and for attempted corporate takeovers.[^3] The [[Illinois Department of Insurance]], then directed by [[James Schacht]], later moved the insurers into liquidation and brought a 1991 civil suit alleging their accounts had been drained, naming Jeffrey Epstein in connection with checks drawn on the United Fire and United Diversified accounts.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Ponzi Scheme
|
||||
|
||||
Money raised from new investors was used to pay returns and redemptions to earlier investors rather than generated by legitimate debt collection, the defining structure of a Ponzi scheme.[^1] Steven Hoffenberg diverted proceeds to personal expenditures and to attempted corporate acquisitions, and the firm's reported revenues and asset values were inflated.[^2] The fraud drew in thousands of noteholders and bondholders, who later pursued recovery through litigation that named the firm's accountants and other professionals as defendants.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Towers Financial in February 1993, and in March 1993 the company filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code.[^2] A receivership was established to recover assets for defrauded investors, and the matter became one of the largest financial frauds in the United States before that of [[Bernard Madoff]].[^1] Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in April 1995 to five criminal charges of defrauding investors of roughly 462 to 475 million dollars and was sentenced in 1997 by Judge [[Robert W. Sweet]] to 20 years in prison, a one million dollar fine and roughly 463 million dollars in restitution; he settled a related SEC civil suit for 60 million dollars and was released in 2013 after about 18 years.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The attempted corporate takeovers drove much of the cash drain. In 1988 Hoffenberg used Towers and the captive Illinois insurers to mount unsuccessful bids for [[Pan American World Airways|Pan Am]] and [[Emery Air Freight]], deploying Jeffrey Epstein as a financial adviser on the financing.[^3] The Pan Am effort collapsed amid the airline's broader decline following the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and the failed raids left the insurers depleted and accelerated regulatory scrutiny of Towers.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Epstein's Role
|
||||
|
||||
Jeffrey Epstein was hired as a consultant around 1987, with reporting citing compensation of about 25,000 dollars per month and a 1988 two million dollar non-repayable loan, and the firm gave him offices at the [[Villard Houses]] in Manhattan.[^3] At the time Epstein operated his own consulting firm, [[International Assets Group]], from his New York apartment after leaving [[Bear Stearns]], and a Towers attorney confirmed his work at the firm and recalled drafting a consulting agreement.[^3] A company press release listed Epstein as "chairman of the board of directors of Intercontinental Asset Group" in the Pan Am financing, and court filings referenced checks payable to "Jeff Epstein" or "Jeff Epstein & Co." totaling about 215,000 dollars drawn on the insurance-company accounts.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The extent of Epstein's involvement in the fraud is disputed. Steven Hoffenberg later claimed Epstein was a co-architect of the scheme and his "partner in what we did raising the billion dollars," and [[Terrence Corrigan]], a lawyer for an investor-recovery committee, said Epstein appeared on organizational charts as potentially the second or third most senior figure at the firm.[^3] The 1991 Illinois Department of Insurance suit alleged Epstein manipulated Emery stock through multiple brokerage accounts he controlled and traded without a broker's license.[^3] Epstein left Towers before its collapse, was never charged in connection with the fraud, and investigators said no concrete evidence directly tied him to the criminal conspiracy.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
[^1]: "Litigation Release: SEC v. Towers Financial Corporation, et al.," *U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,* summarizing the scheme and receivership. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/litreleases/lr15053.txt
|
||||
[^2]: "Jeffrey Epstein's mentor, who once ran a Ponzi scheme, was found dead," *NPR,* 2022, summarizing the Towers collapse, SEC action and sentencing. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/26/1119746511/jeffrey-epstein-mentor-steven-hoffenberg-dead
|
||||
[^3]: "Jeffrey Epstein worked at Towers Financial with Steven Hoffenberg, who committed Ponzi scheme crimes," *CBS News,* 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-worked-at-towers-financial-with-stephen-hoffenberg-who-committed-ponzi-scheme-crimes/
|
||||
[^4]: "Steven Hoffenberg: Who is the former Epstein associate and New York Post owner?," *Yahoo News,* 2019, on the 1970s debt-collection origins and the firm's early model. https://www.yahoo.com/news/steven-hoffenberg-former-epstein-associate-230443969.html
|
||||
63
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/WikiLeaks.md
Normal file
63
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/WikiLeaks.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- WikiLeaks
|
||||
- JulianAssange
|
||||
- Cypherpunks
|
||||
- Leaks
|
||||
- TeamThemis
|
||||
- Palantir
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- WikiLeaks
|
||||
- Wikileaks
|
||||
summary: "WikiLeaks is the leak-publishing organization founded by Julian Assange in 2006, whose 2010 disclosures of US military and diplomatic records triggered a banking blockade that pushed it toward Bitcoin, and which was the target of the 2010-2011 Team Themis proposal by Palantir, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies."
|
||||
location: "Founded online; registered through Sunshine Press"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WikiLeaks is an organization founded in 2006 by [[Julian Assange]] to publish classified and restricted documents submitted anonymously, built on encryption and anonymity techniques drawn from the [[Cypherpunks]] movement in which Assange had been an early participant. Its 2010 release of United States military and diplomatic records, supplied by the Army analyst Chelsea Manning, made it a global political actor and prompted the major payment processors to cut off donations in a "banking blockade," after which WikiLeaks adopted [[Bitcoin]]. In 2010 and 2011 a private consortium called Team Themis, made up of [[Palantir Technologies]], HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies and working for the law firm Hunton & Williams and [[Bank of America]], drafted proposals to attack WikiLeaks and to target the journalist [[Glenn Greenwald]], exposed when [[Anonymous (collective)|Anonymous]] hacked HBGary's email in February 2011.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Assange and the Cypherpunk Roots
|
||||
|
||||
Assange joined the cypherpunks mailing list in the mid-1990s under the handle "Proff," posting from Australia, and wrote software in line with the movement's philosophy, including the Rubberhose deniable-encryption system designed to let a user reveal one passphrase under coercion while concealing the existence of further hidden data. He co-wrote, with Suelette Dreyfus, the 1997 history of the international hacker underground "Underground." The cypherpunk premise, that strong encryption lets individuals defend information against states and corporations, carried directly into WikiLeaks, which Assange built around encrypted, anonymous submission so that a source could deliver documents without the publisher being able to identify them.[^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
WikiLeaks was registered through the Sunshine Press structure in 2006 and published early disclosures on extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic-waste dumping by the firm Trafigura, the membership rolls of the British National Party, and the operating manual for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Assange set out his theory of leaking in essays arguing that conspiratorial and authoritarian institutions depend on secret internal communication and that forcing them to operate under the threat of leaks degrades their capacity to act, a logic that treated disclosure as a way to raise the internal cost of secrecy. The journalist [[Andy Greenberg]] traced the line from the cypherpunks to WikiLeaks in his 2012 book "This Machine Kills Secrets."[^4][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2010 Disclosures and the Banking Blockade
|
||||
|
||||
In 2010 WikiLeaks published a sequence of records leaked by Chelsea Manning. In April it released the gunsight video of a 2007 Baghdad airstrike under the title "Collateral Murder," followed in July by the Afghan War Diary and in October by the Iraq War Logs, two collections of field reports running to hundreds of thousands of documents. In November 2010, working with Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian, Le Monde, and the New York Times, WikiLeaks began publishing the Cablegate archive of about 250,000 United States State Department diplomatic cables. Manning was arrested, charged under the Espionage Act, and sentenced in 2013 to 35 years, later commuted in 2017.[^1][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
In early December 2010, following the Cablegate release, the principal financial intermediaries cut off WikiLeaks: PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, and Western Union stopped processing donations to the organization in what became known as the banking blockade. The blockade severed most of WikiLeaks's funding without any court order directing it. Anonymous responded with Operation Payback, coordinating distributed denial-of-service attacks against the payment processors in defense of WikiLeaks. The cutoff pushed WikiLeaks to seek a payment channel that no intermediary could close.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Bitcoin Adoption
|
||||
|
||||
WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant donation channel, one of the cryptocurrency's first prominent real-world uses. The move was delayed at the urging of [[Satoshi Nakamoto]], who objected on the bitcointalk forum on 11 December 2010 that "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us," warning that the attention would endanger the young network. Assange later wrote that WikiLeaks agreed with Nakamoto's analysis and held off, launching its public Bitcoin donation address on 14 June 2011 after the currency's first major price rise.[^9][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Assange argued in 2014 that the two projects had sustained each other, saying that Bitcoin gave WikiLeaks a funding route around the blockade while WikiLeaks's adoption gave Bitcoin an early demonstration of use. The donation address went on to receive thousands of bitcoin over the following years.[^9][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Team Themis
|
||||
|
||||
In late 2010 the law firm Hunton & Williams, retained by Bank of America and in contact with the United States Chamber of Commerce, brought together three contractors, Palantir Technologies (the data-analytics firm chaired by [[Peter Thiel]]), HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, under the name Team Themis to develop a response to WikiLeaks, which Bank of America feared held damaging internal documents. The group produced a proposal titled "The WikiLeaks Threat," in which Palantir would handle network and insider-threat analysis while Berico and HBGary Federal analyzed the organization. Reporting in The Tech Herald by the journalist Steve Ragan and in the press that followed described the plan as a dirty-tricks operation against WikiLeaks, its supporters, and journalists.[^2][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The proposal recommended submitting fabricated documents to WikiLeaks and then attacking the organization's credibility when it published them, stoking internal divisions, launching cyber attacks to steal data on sources, and running a "media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities." It included a chart of journalists and supporters whose careers could be pressured, among them Glenn Greenwald, then writing for Salon. The slides stated that Greenwald's "level of support" for WikiLeaks "needs to be disrupted," asserted that "without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold," and judged that established professionals like him would "choose professional preservation over cause" if pressured. HBGary Federal's chief executive, Aaron Barr, separately set out to unmask members of Anonymous.[^3][^12]
|
||||
|
||||
In February 2011, after Barr publicly claimed he had identified the leadership of Anonymous, the collective broke into HBGary's systems, took control of its email, and released roughly 50,000 internal messages, which exposed the Team Themis proposals and the exchanges between Barr and a Palantir employee about targeting Greenwald. Palantir's chief executive, [[Alex Karp]], issued a public apology to progressive groups and to Greenwald in particular on 11 February 2011 and said the company had severed "any and all contacts" with HBGary; Palantir placed the employee involved, Matthew Steckman, on leave, and Berico's leadership said it had discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal. On 1 March 2011, seventeen members of Congress, led by Representative Hank Johnson, called for an investigation of possible illegal action by Hunton & Williams and Team Themis. HBGary Federal shut down.[^13][^3][^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "WikiLeaks," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* on the 2006 founding by Assange, the 2010 disclosures, and Chelsea Manning. https://www.britannica.com/topic/WikiLeaks
|
||||
[^2]: "Themis: Looking at the aftermath of the HBGary Federal scandal," on the Team Themis composition, the Hunton & Williams retainer, and the division of labor among the three firms. https://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/themis-looking-at-the-aftermath-of-the-hbgary-federal-scandal/
|
||||
[^3]: "Emails reveal corporate plot to silence WikiLeaks," *Green Left,* on "The WikiLeaks Threat," the proposed tactics, the chart of journalists, the targeting of Greenwald, Aaron Barr, and the Anonymous breach of 50,000 emails. https://www.greenleft.org.au/2011/869/world/emails-reveal-corporate-plot-silence-wikileaks
|
||||
[^4]: Greenberg, Andy. *This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information.* Dutton, 2012.
|
||||
[^5]: Dreyfus, Suelette, with research by Julian Assange. *Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.* Mandarin, 1997; on Assange's cypherpunk activity and the Rubberhose system.
|
||||
[^6]: Assange, Julian. "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance," 2006, on the theory that leaking degrades authoritarian institutions. https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
|
||||
[^7]: "Julian Assange: What you need to know about the WikiLeaks founder," *Al Jazeera,* 20 December 2020, on Collateral Murder, the war logs, Cablegate, and Manning's sentence. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/20/julian-assange
|
||||
[^8]: "Assange: Bitcoin and WikiLeaks Helped Keep Each Other Alive," *CoinDesk,* 16 September 2014, on the banking blockade by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union, and the turn to Bitcoin. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/09/16/assange-bitcoin-and-wikileaks-helped-keep-each-other-alive
|
||||
[^9]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "WikiLeaks contact info?," bitcointalk forum, 11 December 2010, on "kicked the hornet's nest"; and Assange's account of delaying the Bitcoin channel to 14 June 2011. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280
|
||||
[^10]: "WikiLeaks' Public Donation Address Receives 4000th Bitcoin," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on the cumulative donations to the WikiLeaks address. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/wikileaks-public-donation-address-receives-th-bitcoin-1480629241
|
||||
[^11]: Ragan, Steve. "Data intelligence firms proposed a systematic attack against WikiLeaks," *The Tech Herald,* February 2011, on "The WikiLeaks Threat" and the roles of Palantir, Berico, and HBGary Federal. Archived at SourceWatch, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/HBGary
|
||||
[^12]: Greenwald, Glenn. "The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters," *Salon,* 11 February 2011, on the slides targeting him, "needs to be disrupted," "without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold," and "choose professional preservation over cause." https://www.salon.com/2011/02/11/threats_against_glenn_greenwald_wikileaks/
|
||||
[^13]: "Update: Palantir apologizes for proposal to attack WikiLeaks," *Raw Story,* 11 February 2011, on Alex Karp's apology, the severing of contacts with HBGary, and Berico's discontinuation of ties. https://www.rawstory.com/2011/02/data-intelligence-firms-proposed-attack-wikileaks/
|
||||
[^14]: "New information emerges on anti-WikiLeaks plot," *Salon,* 14 February 2011, on Matthew Steckman being placed on leave and the Hunton & Williams role; and on the 1 March 2011 congressional call led by Representative Hank Johnson. https://www.salon.com/2011/02/14/palantir_wikileaks/
|
||||
52
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Worldcoin.md
Normal file
52
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Worldcoin.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Worldcoin
|
||||
- SamAltman
|
||||
- Surveillance
|
||||
- Biometrics
|
||||
- Cryptocurrency
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- World
|
||||
- Tools for Humanity
|
||||
- World ID
|
||||
summary: "Worldcoin, rebranded World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project cofounded by Sam Altman and operated by Tools for Humanity that scans people's irises with a device called the Orb to build a global proof-of-personhood database, and that has been banned or investigated in numerous countries over its data collection."
|
||||
location: "San Francisco, California; Erlangen, Germany"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Worldcoin, rebranded as World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project announced in October 2021 by [[Sam Altman]] and [[Alex Blania]] and operated by the company [[Tools for Humanity]]. It scans people's irises with a chrome sphere called the Orb to enroll them in a global "proof of personhood" database, issuing each verified person a "World ID" and a cryptocurrency token as an incentive. Conceived as a way to distinguish humans from AI agents online, the project has assembled one of the largest private biometric databases in existence and has been banned, suspended, or placed under investigation in numerous countries. It sits alongside [[Palantir Technologies]], [[Clearview AI]], [[Carbyne]], and [[SafeGraph]] as privately held mass-data infrastructure in the [[Silicon Valley]] network, built by Altman, who emerged from the [[Y Combinator]] and [[Peter Thiel]] orbit.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Orb and World ID
|
||||
|
||||
Tools for Humanity, with Altman as chairman and Blania as chief executive, designed the Orb to capture a high-resolution image of a person's iris and convert it on the device into a numerical IrisCode, the basis of the World ID, which the system then proves through zero-knowledge cryptography so that a verification need not reveal the underlying scan. The Orb is not bespoke silicon but a custom carrier board built around an off-the-shelf NVIDIA Jetson module that runs the iris processing locally. Worldcoin launched its WLD token on July 24, 2023 as an ERC-20 asset, initially on the Optimism network, and in October 2024 it launched World Chain, its own layer-two blockchain giving Orb-verified humans priority blockspace.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The project raised a 115 million dollar Series C in May 2023 led by Blockchain Capital with [[Andreessen Horowitz]] and [[Bain Capital]] Crypto, following an earlier round backed by [[Khosla Ventures]], and a further 135 million dollar token sale in May 2025 led by a16z and Bain Capital Crypto, taking total disclosed financing past 375 million dollars. It has enrolled over 17 million people, many in the Global South, where small cryptocurrency payments were offered in exchange for iris scans, against a stated long-term goal of one billion enrolled users.[^3][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Deceptive Recruitment and the Global South
|
||||
|
||||
A 2022 investigation by *MIT Technology Review*, based on interviews with more than thirty-five people across [[Indonesia]], [[Kenya]], [[Sudan]], [[Ghana]], [[Chile]], and [[Norway]], found that Worldcoin's field operations relied on deceptive marketing, collected more personal data than the company acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. Spanish-speaking recruits were handed terms-of-service notices in English, and people in Sudan were drawn in with giveaways of wireless earbuds without being told what the iris scan was for. The company used enrollees' sensitive biometric data to train artificial-intelligence models without their knowledge. The recruitment concentrated in countries with weaker data-protection law, paying poor people small amounts of cryptocurrency for a permanent biometric record, a pattern critics compared to the testing of surveillance technology on vulnerable populations. The whistleblower [[Edward Snowden]] warned in 2022 against the creation of a centralized global iris database.[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The project also carries a structural conflict of interest. Altman's [[OpenAI]] builds the artificial intelligence that erodes the online distinction between humans and machines, while Worldcoin sells the proof-of-personhood remedy for the problem his other company creates, positioning a single principal to profit from both the disease and the cure of an AI-saturated internet.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Regulatory Bans and Privacy Findings
|
||||
|
||||
The project has drawn regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions over its collection of biometric data. Kenya suspended sign-ups in August 2023, and in May 2025 the High Court ordered the company to delete all biometric data collected from Kenyans, a deletion confirmed complete in January 2026. The Bavarian data-protection authority, which oversees Worldcoin's European entity, ruled in December 2024 that its central storage of IrisCodes violated the General Data Protection Regulation and ordered compliant deletion. [[Spain]]'s agency imposed a three-month precautionary ban in March 2024, and Hong Kong's privacy commissioner ordered all operations to cease in May 2024 after finding six data-protection contraventions.[^4][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
Brazil's data-protection authority banned the company in January 2025 from offering cryptocurrency or cash in exchange for biometric data, with a fine of fifty thousand reais a day for resuming, and Indonesia suspended its registration in May 2025; Colombia ordered an "immediate and definitive closure" in October 2025. Despite the scrutiny, the company launched in the United States in April 2025 across six cities, introduced a Visa-linked World Card, and announced partnerships with [[Tinder]], [[Zoom]], and [[Docusign]] to use World ID for human verification. Edward Snowden had warned of the project in October 2021, writing "Don't catalogue eyeballs" and "The human body is not a ticket-punch."[^1][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "US tech embraces Sam Altman's World iris-scan ID banned in places," *Rest of World,* 2026. https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/
|
||||
[^2]: "Worldcoin in Kenya," *TechCrunch,* August 15, 2023, on the Orb, Tools for Humanity, Altman and Blania, and the Kenya enrollment. https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/15/worldcoin-in-kenya
|
||||
[^3]: "Billionaire Sam Altman's Iris Orb Dream," *Yahoo Finance,* on the funding from Khosla Ventures and others and the enrollment figures. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-sam-altmans-iris-orb-010120228.html
|
||||
[^4]: "Sam Altman's iris-scanning Worldcoin temporarily banned in Spain," and the broader regulatory record across Kenya, Spain, Hong Kong, Portugal, Indonesia, Bavaria, and Brazil. *Silicon Republic.* https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/worldcoin-eyeball-scan-biometric-data-ban-sam-altman
|
||||
[^5]: "Deception, exploited workers, and free cash: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users," *MIT Technology Review,* April 6, 2022. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/
|
||||
[^6]: "What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It," *Time,* 2023, on the Snowden criticism and the proof-of-personhood rationale. https://time.com/6300522/worldcoin-sam-altman/
|
||||
[^7]: "Opening the Orb: A look inside Worldcoin's biometric imaging device," World Foundation engineering blog, on the NVIDIA Jetson carrier board and the IrisCode; and "Worldcoin's mainnet WLD token set to go live," *CoinDesk,* July 24, 2023. https://world.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device
|
||||
[^8]: "Sam Altman's crypto project Worldcoin raises $115M led by Blockchain Capital," *CoinDesk,* May 25, 2023; and "World raises $135M," World blog, May 21, 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/05/25/sam-altmans-crypto-project-worldcoin-raises-115m-led-by-blockchain-capital
|
||||
[^9]: "Worldcoin to delete Kenyan biometric data," *Techpoint Africa,* on the May 2025 High Court order; Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht press release, December 19, 2024, on the GDPR deletion order; Agencia Española de Protección de Datos press release, March 6, 2024; and Hong Kong PCPD statement, May 22, 2024. https://www.lda.bayern.de/media/pm/pm2024_08_en.pdf
|
||||
[^10]: "Brazil halts Worldcoin from offering crypto for biometric data," *Cryptonews,* January 24, 2025; "Indonesia suspends World ID registration," *Cointelegraph,* May 2025; "Colombia orders closure of Worldcoin," *Finance Colombia,* October 3, 2025; and Snowden's October 23, 2021 warning, *Decrypt.* https://decrypt.co/84277/snowden-slams-sam-altman-worldcoin-eyeball-scan-for-crypto
|
||||
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/xAI.md
Normal file
46
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/xAI.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- xAI
|
||||
- ElonMusk
|
||||
- OpenAI
|
||||
- ArtificialIntelligence
|
||||
- Grok
|
||||
- X
|
||||
summary: "xAI is the artificial-intelligence company Elon Musk founded in 2023 after departing OpenAI, builder of the Grok model and the Colossus supercomputer, which merged with X in 2025, raised tens of billions of dollars, and whose founder sued OpenAI and Sam Altman over the abandonment of OpenAI's nonprofit mission."
|
||||
location: "Bay Area, California, and Memphis, Tennessee"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
xAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded by [[Elon Musk]] in 2023, which builds the Grok family of large language models and the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk had cofounded [[OpenAI]] in 2015 and left its board in 2018; he launched xAI as a direct competitor and, in 2024, sued OpenAI and its chief executive [[Sam Altman]] for abandoning the nonprofit mission the two had set out to build. In March 2025 xAI acquired the social platform [[X (social media)|X]] in an all-stock deal, merging Musk's AI lab with the network he had bought as Twitter in 2022.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding, Grok, and Colossus
|
||||
|
||||
Musk incorporated xAI in March 2023 and announced it publicly on July 12, 2023, assembling a founding team of eleven researchers drawn from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and Tesla, including the chief engineer Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher, and Jimmy Ba, a coauthor of the widely cited Adam optimization paper. The company stated its aim as building AI to "understand the true nature of the universe." It released its first model, Grok, in November 2023 on X, positioning the chatbot as a "maximally truth-seeking" assistant with real-time access to posts on the platform, and shipped successive versions, reaching Grok 4 by 2025.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
To train its models xAI built Colossus, a supercomputing cluster in Memphis that came online in September 2024 with roughly 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processors and expanded toward 200,000 by early 2025, drawing scrutiny over its power consumption and the gas turbines installed to feed it. The buildout placed xAI among the largest consumers of AI compute in the world and required capital on a scale that drove the company's repeated multibillion-dollar fundraising.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Merger with X and the Fundraising
|
||||
|
||||
On March 28, 2025 Musk announced that xAI had acquired X in an all-stock transaction, exchanging shares of both companies for shares of a new holding company, xAI Holdings Corp. Musk valued xAI at 80 billion dollars and X at 33 billion dollars, the latter figure derived from a 45-billion enterprise value less 12 billion in debt, and said the two companies' futures were now "intertwined." The merger folded the social platform, which Musk had bought as Twitter for 44 billion dollars in October 2022, into the AI company and gave xAI direct access to X's user base and data for training and distribution.[^2][^5]
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xAI raised capital aggressively to fund its compute. After earlier rounds, including a 6-billion-dollar raise that lifted its valuation to roughly 24 billion dollars, the company by late 2025 had taken in more than 20 billion dollars across primary funding alongside a multibillion-dollar debt facility arranged by Morgan Stanley. A December 2025 round drew participation from Nvidia, Valor Equity Partners, StepStone Group, Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital, with reporting putting the combined xAI-X entity's valuation well above 200 billion dollars.[^4][^6]
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### Musk's Lawsuit Against OpenAI
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In February 2024 Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and the cofounder [[Greg Brockman]] in California state court, alleging breach of contract and of the company's founding agreement, which he said committed OpenAI to developing artificial general intelligence as an open-source nonprofit "for the benefit of humanity" rather than for the profit of [[Microsoft]]. Musk, who had pledged early funding to OpenAI at its 2015 launch and served as cochair before leaving the board in 2018, framed the suit around the company's pivot to a capped-profit structure and its deepening Microsoft partnership. He withdrew the state suit in June 2024 and refiled in federal court.[^7][^8]
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The refiled federal complaint, later amended to name Microsoft as a defendant, alleged that OpenAI had become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft and accused Altman of "rampant self-dealing," seeking damages and Altman's removal as chief executive and director; Musk amended the complaint so that any damages would flow to OpenAI's nonprofit rather than to himself. In May 2026 a nine-member advisory jury found that Musk had filed outside the statute of limitations, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the case.[^8]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: "xAI," Britannica Money, on the 2023 founding, the July 12, 2023 announcement, the founding team from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Tesla, and the Grok model. https://www.britannica.com/money/xAI
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[^2]: "Elon Musk says xAI acquired X," *TechCrunch,* March 29, 2025, on the all-stock deal, the xAI Holdings Corp structure, and the 80-billion and 33-billion valuations. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/29/elon-musk-says-xai-acquired-x/
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[^3]: "All 11 xAI co-founders," The Next Web, on the eleven founding researchers including Igor Babuschkin and Jimmy Ba and their prior employers. https://thenextweb.com/news/xai-all-cofounders-departed-musk-spacex-rebuild
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[^4]: "xAI revenue, valuation and funding," Sacra, on the Colossus buildout, the more-than-20-billion total raised, and the Morgan Stanley debt facility. https://sacra.com/c/xai/
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[^5]: "xAI Buys X: Why It Happened," FinTech Weekly, on the merger rationale and the Twitter acquisition history. https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/xai-acquires-x-twitter-merger-elon-musk-ai
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[^6]: "Elon Musk's xAI raises $20 billion in Nvidia-backed funding round," *Gulf News,* 2025, on the December 2025 round and the Valor, StepStone, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital participation. https://gulfnews.com/business/markets/elon-musks-xai-raises-20-billion-in-nvidia-backed-funding-round-1.500400546
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[^7]: "Elon Musk sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over contract breach," *CNBC,* March 1, 2024, on the breach-of-contract claims, the founding agreement, and Musk's departure from the OpenAI board in 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/elon-musk-sues-openai-and-ceo-sam-altman-over-contract-breach.html
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[^8]: "Jury dismisses all claims in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman," *NPR,* May 18, 2026, on the refiled federal suit, the Microsoft defendant amendment, the "self-dealing" allegation, and the May 2026 dismissal. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5822366/musk-altman-openai-jury-verdict-claims-dismissed
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