Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals.
But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost $5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property.
During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the $20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the “longtermism”, “rationalism” and “effective altruism” (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future.
At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism.
Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.
But recently filed federal court documents allege that in the months before the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto empire, he and other company insiders funnelled almost $5m to Lightcone, including $1m for a deposit to lock in the Rose Garden deal.
FTX bankruptcy administrators say that money was commingled with funds looted from FTX customers. Now, they are asking a judge to give it back.
The revelations cast new light on so-called “Tescreal” intellectual movements – an umbrella term for a cluster of movements including EA and rationalism that exercise broad influence in Silicon Valley, and have the ear of the likes of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk.
It also raises questions about the extent to which people within that movement continue to benefit from Bankman-Fried’s fraud, the largest in US history.
The Guardian contacted Habryka for comment on this reporting but received no response. [After publication, Habryka told the Guardian he had not received the request for comment sent to him in advance, and he said that “no FTX funds were used in the purchase of Lighthaven”.]
Controversial conferences
Last weekend, Lighthaven was the venue for the Manifest 2024 conference, which, according to the website, is “hosted by Manifold and Manifund”.
Manifold is a startup that runs prediction markets – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference; Manifund is an EA-aligned nonprofit.
Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).
Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic.
Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.
One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)
Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.
The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.
Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.
Another advertised guest, Michael Lai, is emblematic of tech’s new willingness to intervene in Bay Area politics. Lai, an entrepreneur, was one of a slate of “Democrats for Change” candidates who seized control of the powerful Democratic County Central Committee from progressives, who had previously dominated the body that confers endorsements on candidates for local office.
In a phone interview, Lai said he did not attend the Manifest conference in early June. “I wasn’t there, and I did not know about what these guys believed in,” Lai said. He also claimed to not know why he was advertised on the manifest.is website as a conference-goer, adding that he had been invited by Austin Chen of Manifold Markets. In an email, Chen, who organized the conference and is a co-founder of Manifund, wrote: “We’d scheduled Michael for a talk, but he had to back out last minute given his campaigning schedule.
“This kind of thing happens often with speakers, who are busy people; we haven’t gotten around to removing Michael yet but will do so soon,” Chen added.
On the other speakers, Chen wrote in an earlier email: “We were aware that some of these folks have expressed views considered controversial.”
He went on: “Some of these folks we’re bringing in because of their past experience with prediction markets (eg [Richard] Hanania has used them extensively and partnered with many prediction market platforms). Others we’re bringing in for their particular expertise (eg Brian Chau is participating in a debate on AI safety, related to his work at Alliance for the Future).”
Chen added: “We did not invite them to give talks about race and IQ” and concluded: “Manifest has no specific views on eugenics or race & IQ.”
Democrats for Change received significant support from Bay Area tech industry heavyweights, and Lai is now running for the San Francisco board of supervisors, the city’s governing body. He is endorsed by a “grey money” influence network funded by rightwing tech figures like David Sacks and Garry Tan. The same network poured tens of thousands of dollars into his successful March campaign for the DCCC and ran online ads in support of him, according to campaign contribution data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission.
Several controversial guests were also present at Manifest 2023, also held at Lighthaven, including rightwing writer Hanania, whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost, and Malcolm and Simone Collins, whose EA-inspired pro-natalism – the belief that having as many babies as possible will save the world – was detailed in the Guardian last month.
The Collinses were, along with Razib Khan and Jonathan Anomaly, featured speakers at the eugenicist Natal Conference in Austin last December, as previously reported in the Guardian.
Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”
HoSang added: “From there, they anoint themselves the elite managers of these forces, investing in the ‘winners’ as they see fit.”
“The presence of Stephen Hsu here is particularly alarming,” HoSang concluded. “He’s often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people like Ron Unz, Steven Sailer and Stefan Molyneux and more mainstream figures in tech, investment and scientific research, especially around human genetics.”
FTX proceedings
As Lighthaven develops as a hub for EA and rationalism, the new court filing alleges that the purchase of the property was partly secured with money funnelled by Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX insiders in the months leading up to the crypto empire’s collapse.
Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for masterminding the $8bn fraud that led to FTX’s downfall in November 2022, in which customer money was illegally transferred from FTX to sister exchange Alameda Research to address a liquidity crisis.
Since the collapse, FTX and Alameda have been in the hands of trustees, who in their efforts to pay back creditors are also pursuing money owed to FTX, including money they say was illegitimately transferred to others by Bankman-Fried and company insiders.
On 13 May, those trustees filed a complaint with a bankruptcy court in Delaware – where FTX and Lightcone both were incorporated – alleging that Lightcone received more than $4.9m in fraudulent transfers from Alameda, via the non-profit FTX Foundation, over the course of 2022.
State and federal filings indicate that Lightcone was incorporated on 13 October 2022 with Habryka acting in all executive roles. In an application to the IRS for 501(c)3 charitable status, Habryka aligned the organization with an influential intellectual current in Silicon Valley: “Combining the concepts of the Longtermism movement … and rationality … Lightcone Infrastructure Inc works to steer humanity towards a safer and better future.”
California filings also state that from 2017 until the application, Lightcone and its predecessor project had been operating under the fiscal sponsorship of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a rationalism non-profit established in 2012.
The main building on the property now occupied by the Lighthaven campus was originally constructed in 1903 as a mansion, and between 1979 and Lightcone’s 2022 purchase of the property, the building was run as a hotel, the Rose Garden Inn.
Alameda county property records indicate that the four properties encompassed by the campus remain under the ownership of an LLC, Lightcone Rose Garden (Lightcone RG). The 13 May complaint says Lightcone RG is “is owned and/or controlled by CFAR and/or persons affiliated with CFAR”; CFAR, Lightcone, and Lightcone RG share the same address located at the Lighthaven campus, according to California business records.
On 2 March 2022, according to the complaint, CFAR applied to the FTX Foundation asking that “$2,000,000 be given to the Center for Applied Rationality as an exclusive grant for its project, the Lightcone Infrastructure Team”. FTX Foundation wired the money the same day.
Between then and October 2022, according to trustees, the FTX Foundation wired at least 14 more transfers worth $2,904,999.61. In total, FTX’s administrators say, almost $5m was transferred to CFAR from the FTX Foundation.
On 13 July and 18 August 2022, according to the complaint, the FTX Foundation also wired two payments of $500,000 each to a title company as a deposit for Lightcone RG’s purchase of the Rose Garden Inn. The complaint says these were intended as a loan but there is no evidence that the $1m was repaid.
Then, on 3 October, the FTX Foundation approved a $1.5m grant to Lightcone Infrastructure, according to FTX trustees
The complaint alleges that Lightcone got another $20m loan to fund the Rose Garden Inn purchase from Slimrock Investments Pte Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company owned by Estonian software billionaire, Skype inventor and EA/rationalism adherent Jaan Tallinn. This included the $16.5m purchase price and $3.5m for renovations and repairs.
Slimrock investments has no apparent public-facing website or means of contact. The Guardian emailed Tallinn for comment via the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit whose self-assigned mission is: “Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Tallinn sits on that organization’s board. Neither Tallinn nor the Future of Life Institute responded to the request.
The complaint also says that FTX trustees emailed CFAR four times between June and August 2023, and that on 31 August they hand-delivered a letter to CFAR’s Rose Garden Inn offices. All of these attempts at contact were ignored. Only after the debtors filed a discovery motion on 31 October 2023 did CFAR engage with them.
The most recent filing on 17 May is a summons for CFAR and Lightcone to appear in court to answer the complaint.
The suit is ongoing.
The Guardian emailed CFAR president and co-founder Anna Salamon for comment on the allegations but received no response.
• This article was amended on 17 June 2024 to include a comment from Oliver Habryka about the purchase of Lighthaven that was received after publication; in responding, Habryka disclosed an escrow document for the property’s purchase showing a $1m deposit from, and refunded to, North Dimension Inc, a subsidiary of FTX’s sister company Alameda, which he said meant “the relevant funds never entered our bank account”. An earlier version mistakenly said Lightcone, rather than CFAR, was the sole member of Lightcone Rose Garden, and that Habryka was the latter’s registered agent, when another individual is listed in that role. A reference to Manifund as a “prediction market” has also been corrected.
