This November, voters in Sam Bankman-Fried's native California are on track to see a proposal on the ballot to fund a major new pandemic prevention program by taxing the rich, which he helped to launch and bankroll. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
At this point, however, it is a zombie ballot initiative. The campaign to sell it to voters has seen its cash on hand dwindle from more than $15 million at its peak to a reported $78 on hand at the end of last year. A fleet of political consultants once on retainer have signed up to work on other campaigns instead. Politicians who lined up to throw their support behind the proposal stopped talking about it after the main benefactor was disgraced.
The world may have since largely moved on from Covid, but the California ballot has not. Many key players in state politics, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have resisted the pandemic tax, but only one person can now make the decision to pull it before a vote. And he might just be the last true believer in the cause to which Bankman-Fried dedicated his millions.
From the end of 2021 through early 2022, the pandemic initiative’s funders spent millions on gathering the requisite signatures. They started working to recruit allies in California’s political firmament, reaching out to trusted validators like the California Medical Association. On May 5, 2022, the campaign delivered 1.5 million signatures, far more than required to qualify for that fall’s ballot, to the secretary of state., but the most important political figure in the state was not on board.
“I haven’t heard from those guys in months,” said Dustin Corcoran, CEO of the California Medical Association, which has formally supported the initiative since February 2022. “I have no idea what the plan is.”secretary of state will formally assign a proposition number to the Pandemic Early Detection and Prevention Institute Initiative, guaranteeing it a place among as many as a dozen issue questions on the ballots mailed this fall to more than 22 million citizens.
, Bankman-Fried’s hubris and artificial intelligence. The words “pandemic,” “virus,” “Covid-19,” or “ballot initiative” do not appear once in the 3,800-word post. That legally places the fate of Bankman-Fried’s last political ambition in the hands of Henderson, who spent years climbing the tech industry ladder at companies like Google before joining the leadership of nonprofits focused on Covid-19 prevention and effective altruism.