According to Forbes, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna are racing to give away the vast majority of their $20+ billion fortune through evidence-based philanthropy. They’ve already donated over $4 billion, including more than $600 million in fiscal 2025 alone, with their foundation holding approximately $10 billion more. The couple made early bets on AI safety, donating $30 million to OpenAI’s nonprofit in 2017 and investing in Anthropic’s $124 million funding round in 2021 before moving their estimated $500 million Anthropic stake into a nonprofit vehicle this year. Their largest grants have gone to global health interventions like malaria prevention ($307 million to Malaria Consortium) and deworming programs ($206 million to Evidence Action). Through their foundation Good Ventures and operating nonprofit Open Philanthropy, which Tuna chairs, they’re now trying to influence other billionaires’ giving while accelerating their own distribution.
The accidental AI investors
Here’s what’s fascinating about their AI philanthropy journey. They got into OpenAI and Anthropic back when both labs were basically preaching AI safety as their core mission. Tuna stresses they were backing principles, not profit potential – and they’ve since moved their Anthropic stake into a nonprofit vehicle to avoid any appearance of conflict. Their approach reflects this interesting tension between being tech insiders who understand acceleration pressures and being philanthropists worried about society’s ability to keep up.
And honestly, their nuclear energy comparison is pretty compelling. Tuna argues that if we’d regulated nuclear more thoughtfully early on, we might have avoided those early accidents that essentially killed the industry for decades. Now she sees similar dynamics with AI – hundreds of billions pouring in, massive competitive pressure, but potentially catastrophic risks if we don’t coordinate across companies and countries. The question is whether philanthropy can actually shape something moving this fast.
The math-based giving machine
What really sets their approach apart is this almost clinical focus on data and metrics. They literally calculate “disability-adjusted life years” for their global health grants. Every dollar has to create as much value as giving $2,000 to someone making $50,000 in the US. That’s some serious number crunching.
The Malaria Consortium CEO said the amount of data they demanded was “huge” – they even had to negotiate about whether malaria medicine for children was as valuable as mosquito nets for adults, since children don’t work and therefore don’t provide as much economic value in their models. They eventually added a “moral factor” to account for this. Basically, they’re trying to remove emotion from philanthropy while still maintaining some ethical guardrails.
Building a giving machine
Now Tuna is trying to scale beyond just their own money. She’s turning Open Philanthropy into a multi-donor vehicle, already pulling in over $200 million from other billionaires like Stripe’s Patrick Collison and Google cofounder Larry Page’s wife Lucy Southworth. They’ve launched these themed 10-year, $100+ million funds for lead exposure and what they’re calling “abundance and growth.”
Think about the infrastructure required to move this much money effectively. When you’re dealing with industrial-scale philanthropy, you need industrial-grade systems to track impact and efficiency. It’s not just about writing checks – it’s about building what amounts to a distributed computing platform for social good, where every component needs to work reliably under heavy loads. The operational challenge is massive.
From journalist to philanthropic CEO
Tuna’s background is actually pretty interesting here. She was a Wall Street Journal reporter on an entry-level salary watching her bank account dwindle when a mutual friend set her up with Moskovitz in 2009. She quit journalism in 2011 to focus full-time on philanthropy, and her first move was interviewing hundreds of experts over a year.
Most told her to fund causes she’s passionate about. She completely ignored that advice. Her reasoning? If most donors come from wealthy, healthy circumstances, then passion-based giving will miss the biggest opportunities to help the most disadvantaged people. Instead, she developed this three-part framework: importance, neglectedness, and tractability. How many people does it affect? How many others are working on it? Can philanthropy actually make progress?
And here’s the thing – she views their wealth as accidental, possibly even influenced by supernatural forces. So she feels spiritually motivated to give in this hyper-rational, math-based way that often has nothing to do with causes she personally cares about. It’s this weird blend of almost Buddhist detachment with Silicon Valley data obsession. Whether you agree with their approach or not, you have to admit they’re at least trying to be systematic about solving humanity’s biggest problems with their Facebook fortune.
