Jacob Steinhardt donations made to GiveWell

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United States
Facebook username jacob.steinhardt
LinkedIn username jacob-steinhardt-a30437bb
Twitter usernamejacobsteinhardt
LessWrong usernamejsteinhardt
Effective Altruism Forum usernamejsteinhardt
GitHub usernamejsteinha
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?person=Jacob+Steinhardt

This entity is also a donee.

Full donor page for donor Jacob Steinhardt

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country United States
Facebook page GiveWell.org
Websitehttps://www.givewell.org
Donate pagehttps://secure.givewell.org/support-givewell
Transparency and financials pagehttps://www.givewell.org/about/official-records
Donation case pagehttps://blog.givewell.org/2015/12/25/december-2015-update-on-givewells-funding-needs/
Twitter usernamegivewell
Wikipedia pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell
Timelines wiki pagehttps://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_GiveWell
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=GiveWell
Key peopleHolden Karnofsky|Elie Hassenfeld
Launch date2007

This entity has also influenced donations by others.

Full donee page for donee GiveWell

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900
Global health and development 1 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900 900

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2021
Global health and development (filter this donor) 1 900.00 900.00
Total 1 900.00 900.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
900.0012021-06-23Global health and developmenthttps://bounded-regret.ghost.io/donations-19-20/GiveWell Intended use of funds (category): Organizational general support

Intended use of funds: These funds are to direct support GiveWell's operating expenses. This is in contrast with unrestricted support to GiveWell, that could get reallocated by GiveWell to its top charities when it has excess funds.

Donor reason for selecting the donee: The donation post talks of a 14% donation to the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund, and adds: "Finally, GiveWell recommends allocating 10% of the donation to them to operating expenses, which I rounded up [from 10% of 14% = 1.4%] to 2%."

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The donation post talks of a 14% donation to the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund, and adds: "Finally, GiveWell recommends allocating 10% of the donation to them to operating expenses, which I rounded up [from 10% of 14% = 1.4%] to 2%." It also includes context on the total amount ($45,000): "Each year I aim to donate around 10% of my income. [...] The impact of COVID-19 on poor countries made me better appreciate how much better I have it than most of the world, so I tried to donate closer to 20% of my 2020 income, and that will be my goal moving forward as well. Between 2019 and 2020, this came out to $45,000 in total."
Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 2.00%

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The donation post says: "Each year I aim to donate around 10% of my income. In 2019, I fell behind on this, probably due to the chaos of COVID-19 (but really this was just an embarassing logistical failure on my part). I've recently, finally, finished processing donations for 2019 and 2020."

Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: The donation post says: "Finally, I feel that giving only 2% to GiveWell created perverse incentives: if GHDF hadn't existed, I would have donated more to GiveWell and thus given more to cover their operating costs. Since GHDF is run by the CEO of GiveWell, it seems incorrect to penalize GiveWell for GHDF's existence, so moving forward I will allocate 10% of my {GiveWell + GHDF} donation to cover operating expenses."