I wouldn't be too surprised if someone on the GAP leadership team had indeed participated in an illegal straw donor scheme, given media reports and general impressions of how recklessly some of the SBF-adjacent politics stuff was carried out. But, I do think the specific title allegation is worded too strongly and sweepingly given the lack of clear evidence, and will probably turn out to be wrong.

I think both the original post and this comment don't do a great job at capturing the nuance of what's going on. I think the original post makes many valid points and isn't "90% just a confusion", and I suspect in fact may end up looking like it was correct about some of its key claims. But, I also suspect it'll be wrong on a lot of the details/specifics, and in particular it seems problematic to me that it makes fairly severe accusations without clear caveats on what we know and what we don't know at this point.

(I downvoted both this comment and the OP.)

At least 300 political contributions are suspected by the investigation to have been made with straw donors

This claim is false; the source says that they "were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds". Which is frustrating, as the former would be much more surprising and interesting than the latter.

I think this was the maximally best April Fool's post.

I read his comment differently, but I'll stop engaging now as I don't really have time for this many follow-ups, sorry!

What if the investor decided to invest knowing there was an X% chance of being defrauded, and thought it was a good deal because there's still an at least (100-X)% chance of it being a legitimate and profitable business? For what number X do you think it's acceptable for EAs to accept money?

Fraud base rates are 1-2%; some companies end up highly profitable for their investors despite having committed fraud. Should EA accept money from YC startups? Should EA accept money from YC startups if they e.g. lied to their investors?

I think large-scale defrauding unsuspecting customers (who don't share the upside from any risky gambles) is vastly worse than defrauding professional investors who are generally well-aware of the risks (and can profit from FTX's risky gambles).

(I'm genuinely confused about this question; the main thing I'm confident in is that it's not a very black-and-white kind of thing, and so I don't want to make my bet about that.)

I think that's false; I think the FTX bankruptcy was hard to anticipate or prevent (despite warning flags), and accepting FTX money was the right judgment call ex ante.

I expect a 3-person board with a deep understanding of and commitment to the mission to do a better job selecting new board members than a 9-person board with people less committed to the mission. I also expect the 9-person board members to be less engaged on average.

(I avoid the term "value-alignment" because different people interpret it very differently.)

That was an example; I'd want it to exclude any type of fraud except for the large-scale theft from retail customers that is the primary concern with FTX.

I think 9-member boards are often a bad idea because they tend to have lots of people who are shallowly engaged, rather than a smaller number of people who are deeply engaged, tend to have more diffusion of responsibility, and tend to have much less productive meetings than smaller groups of people. While this can be mitigated somewhat with subcommittees and specialization, I think the optimal number of board members for most EA orgs is 3–6.