---
category: "Authors & Journalists"
tags:
  - Person
  - Journalist
  - Philanthropy
  - EffectiveAltruism
  - OpenPhilanthropy
summary: "Former Fortune senior writer who covers foundations, effective altruism and psychedelics, and whose 2018 Stanford Social Innovation Review article mapped the entities around Cari Tuna and Open Philanthropy."
relations:
  - type: employed_by
    with: "[[Fortune (magazine)]]"
    role: "senior writer"
    fn: 2
  - type: investigated
    with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
    start: 2018
    fn: 2
created: 2026-09-23
updated: 2026-09-23
---

Marc Gunther is an American journalist who has worked as a reporter for nearly 50 years, on politics, government, television, the media business, corporate sustainability, the nonprofit world and psychedelics, for *[[Fortune (magazine)|Fortune]]*, *[[The Guardian]]*, *[[The Chronicle of Philanthropy]]* and other publications. He edits the Medium publications *Nonprofit Chronicles*, *The Psychedelic Renaissance* and *The Great Vape Debate*, and describes his subjects as "psychedelics, smoking and vaping, animal rights, philanthropy and effective altruism."[^1]

### Open Philanthropy

In the Summer 2018 issue of the *[[Stanford Social Innovation Review]]*, which described him as a former senior writer at *Fortune* and author or co-author of four books, Gunther profiled [[Cari Tuna]], who became an effective altruist after reading [[Peter Singer]]'s *The Life You Can Save* and joined the board of [[GiveWell]] in 2011. He wrote that she played "a key role in no fewer than seven entities" as a director or major donor, including [[Good Ventures]], the [[Open Philanthropy Action Fund]] and donor-advised funds at the [[Silicon Valley Community Foundation]]. [[Alexander Berger]] told him that "each has a reason for being" and that "tax considerations are key." Gunther reported that [[Holden Karnofsky]], a co-founder of GiveWell who had worked at [[Bridgewater Associates]], sat on the board of [[OpenAI]], that Good Ventures made its first grant, of 50,000 dollars, to GiveWell in 2011, and that [[Open Philanthropy]], which separated from GiveWell in 2017, "does not disclose its annual operating costs or the salaries or benefits of its highest-paid staff members."[^2]

### Footnotes

[^1]: Gunther, Marc. "About." *Medium,* archived April 14, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250414190549/https://marcgunther.medium.com/about
[^2]: Gunther, Marc. "Giving in the Light of Reason." *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* Summer 2018. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason