Dustin Moskovitz
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| Dustin Moskovitz | |
|---|---|
| Born | Dustin Aaron Moskovitz, May 22, 1984, in Gainesville, Florida, United States |
| Raised in | Ocala, Florida |
| Education | Vanguard High School (International Baccalaureate); Harvard University (attended 2002 to 2004, did not graduate) |
| Known for | Co-founder of Facebook (2004); co-founder and chairman of Asana (2008); co-founder of Good Ventures (2011); principal funder of Open Philanthropy |
| Spouse | Cari Tuna (married 2013) |
| Net worth | About US$10.2 billion (Forbes, April 2026); about US$11.6 billion (Bloomberg Billionaires Index, March 2026) |
| Affiliations | Effective altruism movement; Giving Pledge signatory (2010) |
| Twitter/X / Threads | @moskov |
Dustin Aaron Moskovitz (born May 22, 1984) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist who, through the foundation Good Ventures and the grantmaker Open Philanthropy, is the single largest private funder of AI safety research in the world. He co-founded Facebook in 2004 and the workplace software company Asana in 2008, and his Facebook and Asana wealth has made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the United States. Together with his wife Cari Tuna, he has directed the bulk of that fortune at problems he considers neglected, and he has stated publicly that the long-run trajectory of advanced artificial intelligence is the most important of them. By 2023 Open Philanthropy reported giving more than $300 million across more than 170 grants in its "potential risks from advanced AI" focus area, a figure that had reached roughly $336 million, about 12 percent of the organization's cumulative grantmaking, by the mid-2020s.[15][24]
He co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes in February 2004, served as the company's first chief technology officer, and left in October 2008 to start Asana with another former Facebook engineer, Justin Rosenstein. He led Asana as CEO from its founding through 2025, when he transitioned to chairman.[4]
The reason he sits on this wiki is what he has done with the money. With Tuna, Moskovitz founded the family foundation Good Ventures in 2011 and signed the Giving Pledge the year before, becoming the youngest couple to commit to giving away most of their fortune. Their pledge letter stated that they would "donate and invest with both urgency and mindfulness, aiming to foster a safer, healthier and more economically empowered global community."[5] Almost all of that fortune flows through Open Philanthropy, the grantmaking organization that began as a partnership between GiveWell and Good Ventures in 2014 and became fully independent on June 1, 2017. Moskovitz and Tuna are Open Philanthropy's primary funders. As of mid-2025 the organization had directed more than $4 billion in lifetime grants, and it is widely described as the single largest private funder of AI safety research in the world.[15] The grantees include Anthropic, OpenAI (during its nonprofit period), MIRI, Redwood Research, the Alignment Research Center led by Paul Christiano, the Center for AI Safety, the Center for Human-Compatible AI, the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, and many others.
For a long stretch in the mid-2010s, Moskovitz was the youngest self-made billionaire on the Forbes list. He has spent the years since divesting most of his Facebook shares and aiming the proceeds at problems he and Tuna consider neglected. By his own public statements, the most important of those problems is the development of advanced artificial intelligence. "I definitely think there's a big risk there, something I spend a lot of time thinking about," he told CNBC in June 2023, describing risks from runaway AI as one of the focus areas of his philanthropy.[27] He reiterated the priority on the Stratechery podcast in October 2025 and across his social media accounts.[13]
Moskovitz was born in Gainesville, Florida, on May 22, 1984, the son of a psychiatrist and a teacher, and grew up in Ocala, in central Florida. He went to Vanguard High School in Ocala and graduated from its International Baccalaureate program. The young Moskovitz was a quiet kid who learned to code early and read a lot. By the time he applied to Harvard he had already been writing software for years.
He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 2002 as an economics major and ended up in the same dorm, Kirkland House, as Mark Zuckerberg. The two were not in the original Harvard.edu hack that produced Facemash, but they became friends and roommates, and Moskovitz was one of the first people Zuckerberg pulled in to help when the new social-network project went live in February 2004. He was the third person to sign up for what was then called Thefacebook, after Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin.
In the early months of 2004, Moskovitz worked on Facebook in his dorm room. He was the only one of the founders with a real engineering bent who was not Zuckerberg, and he handled most of the work of porting the site from one university campus to the next. The first universities after Harvard were Yale, Columbia, and Stanford, all rolled out by Moskovitz over a few weeks in late February and March 2004.
In June 2004 Zuckerberg, Hughes, and Moskovitz moved to a rented house in Palo Alto for the summer. Moskovitz never went back. He dropped out of Harvard a year into the venture and stayed in California to run engineering for the new company, which incorporated as Facebook, Inc. that summer with Sean Parker and Peter Thiel newly involved. Moskovitz's title at the start was chief technology officer; later it became vice president of engineering. He was responsible for the team that scaled the site from a few thousand users in college dorms to several hundred million worldwide.
His last day at Facebook was October 3, 2008. He was twenty-four. By then his ownership stake was a little over two percent, which would prove to be enough.
Moskovitz left Facebook with Justin Rosenstein, another Facebook engineer who had built much of the company's internal tooling and who had been a product manager at Google before that. The two had spent a chunk of their last year at Facebook hacking on internal task-management software because they were frustrated by how much of their day was spent in meetings about who was doing what. They incorporated Asana on December 16, 2008.
The early Asana product, released commercially in April 2012, was a web application for tracking tasks, projects, and dependencies inside teams. The pitch was that the work of coordinating work, the meta-work, was the bottleneck on most knowledge-economy productivity, and a good shared system of record could absorb a lot of it. The company raised quietly and slowly. Benchmark led the seed and Series A in 2009 and 2011, with Mitch Lasky as the lead partner; Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Mike Schroepfer, Marc Benioff, Sean Parker, and others followed in later rounds. The S-1 prospectus filed with the SEC in August 2020 disclosed total venture funding of about $213 million in primary equity, plus the convertible notes Moskovitz himself had bought.[9] By the late 2010s Asana had a few hundred thousand paying customers and was competing with Atlassian's Jira, Monday.com, ClickUp, and Microsoft Planner.
On September 30, 2020, Asana went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ASAN. The listing was a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO, the same path Spotify and Slack had taken; the NYSE set a $21 reference price the day before, the stock opened around $27, and the company's initial valuation came in at roughly $5.5 billion.[7][8] Moskovitz held about 36 percent of the company at the time of the listing and had personally lent Asana $375 million in convertible notes during the years before going public, an unusual arrangement that let him bankroll growth without bringing in another big outside investor.
Asana spent the first half of the 2020s focused on enterprise customers and on the slow grind of deepening features for large workflows. The company has been steady but not explosive: revenue grew from about $227 million in fiscal 2020 to $723.9 million in fiscal 2025 (the year ended January 31, 2025), up 11 percent from $652.5 million in fiscal 2024, with operating losses persisting through most of that stretch (a GAAP operating loss of $266.7 million in fiscal 2025).[10] The fiscal 2025 10-K filed in March 2025 disclosed roughly 23,000 paying customers contributing $100,000 or more in annualized recurring revenue, the segment Asana has been pushing the company toward as it builds out enterprise features.[10]
On September 28, 2023, at the company's annual Asana Forward conference, Moskovitz announced Asana Intelligence, a set of generative AI features built into the core product rather than sold as a separate add-on.[11] The first wave included smart goals (auto-summarized progress reports against company objectives), smart status (executive-style updates generated from underlying task activity), smart fields (AI classification of free-text task fields), and smart editor (natural-language drafting and rewriting inside Asana). The features used a mixture of Anthropic and OpenAI models behind the scenes. Moskovitz framed the launch as Asana's first step toward an "AI teammate" model of work, where coordination work that humans had previously done by hand could be delegated to AI assistants embedded in the work graph.[11]
On October 22, 2024, Asana announced AI Studio, a no-code builder for embedding generative AI agents into Asana workflows.[12] Customers can pick the underlying language model from a small menu (Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku, OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini) and write English-language instructions that turn into agents that triage tickets, draft updates, summarize discussions, and route work. Moskovitz described it on the launch day as moving Asana from a system that watches what humans do to a system where AI "actively works as a teammate."[12] AI Studio is sold as an add-on to Asana's Enterprise and Enterprise+ tiers.
In March 2025 Asana announced that Moskovitz planned to retire from the CEO role. On June 25, 2025, the company named Dan Rogers, formerly president of Rubrik, chief executive of LaunchDarkly, and a marketing leader at ServiceNow, as its next chief executive; Rogers started on July 21, 2025, and Moskovitz became chairman.[1] Rogers's package included a $650,000 base salary and $35 million in restricted stock units. The stock fell sharply on the initial succession announcement, with public coverage focused on the question of whether Asana's identity, which had always been bound to its founder, would survive the transition; shares closed at $12.93 on the announcement day, far below the November 2021 record close of $142.68.[1] Moskovitz said in subsequent interviews, including the October 2025 Stratechery conversation with Ben Thompson, that he wanted to spend more of his time on philanthropy, particularly on AI policy, and that he was confident enough in Rogers to hand over the operating company.[13]
Moskovitz and Tuna started talking about giving away most of his Facebook stock almost as soon as they started dating in 2009. He had become extremely wealthy on paper very quickly, the company they were watching get rich on was already past the point of needing his money, and Tuna in particular was the daughter of a doctor and an inheritance lawyer who had grown up arguing about the ethics of wealth. By 2010 the couple had signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge, at the time the youngest individuals to do so. Tuna was twenty-five.[5]
A year later, in 2011, they founded Good Ventures, a private foundation in San Francisco. Tuna left her reporting job at the Wall Street Journal in 2011 to run it. The early Good Ventures grants were broad and somewhat scattered. The couple kept saying publicly that they did not yet know what to do with so much money and that they wanted to take their time figuring it out.
In the search for a method, Tuna and Moskovitz turned to GiveWell, the charity evaluator Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld had founded in 2007. GiveWell at the time recommended a short list of evidence-backed global health charities, the kind of thing where you could roughly estimate dollars per life saved. Good Ventures became a major funder. But Karnofsky, Tuna, and Moskovitz all believed the GiveWell methodology was too narrow for a foundation with the kind of money Good Ventures had to spend. In 2012 they jointly launched a project called GiveWell Labs to investigate causes outside the GiveWell list, including, almost from the start, risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
In 2014 GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project. The new name signaled both broader cause coverage and a commitment to publishing the reasoning behind every grant in unusual depth. Open Philanthropy adopted a framework familiar to anyone in the effective altruism movement: importance, neglectedness, and tractability, paired with a hits-based theory where most grants might fail and the rare success had to make up the difference.
On June 1, 2017, the two organizations formally separated. GiveWell sold the Open Philanthropy Project's assets into a new entity, Open Philanthropy LLC, with Karnofsky and Cari Tuna initially serving as co-CEOs. Tuna later transitioned to board chair. In 2021 the organization formalized a co-CEO structure with Karnofsky leading global catastrophic risks (mostly AI safety and biosecurity) and Alexander Berger leading global health and wellbeing. Karnofsky departed in 2025 to join Anthropic directly. Berger is now CEO. In November 2025 Open Philanthropy rebranded as Coefficient Giving, although the older name still dominates academic and journalistic references.
Moskovitz and Tuna remain the principal funders of the operation. Their giving in 2024 alone exceeded $650 million through Open Philanthropy, with cumulative lifetime giving past $4 billion.[22][23] They have said publicly that they intend to spend the bulk of the fortune within their lifetimes, in line with the position that delaying giving means watching potentially solvable problems compound.
This is the part of the story that puts Moskovitz on this wiki. Through Open Philanthropy, he and Tuna have, by a wide margin, been the largest private funders of work on the safety, alignment, and governance of advanced AI. By 2023 Open Philanthropy reported giving more than $300 million across more than 170 grants in its AI focus area; by the mid-2020s the cumulative figure had reached roughly $336 million, about 12 percent of the organization's cumulative giving.[15][24][27] That sounds like a small slice until you remember that we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars going to a research field that for most of its history was funded almost entirely by a handful of donors. In 2025 the organization issued a request for proposals committing $40 million over five months to technical AI safety research across 21 areas, from interpretability to dangerous-capability evaluations.[15]
The table below summarizes some of the most notable Open Philanthropy grants in the AI safety and AI governance space. Amounts are taken from publicly reported figures in the organization's grants database, journalistic coverage, and annual reports. Where the original grant had multiple tranches across years, the year shown is the year of the principal commitment.
| Recipient | Year | Reported amount | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | 2017 | $30 million ($10M/year for 3 years) | General support during nonprofit phase; included a board seat for Holden Karnofsky (2017 to 2021) |
| Machine Intelligence Research Institute | 2016 onward | More than $20 million across multiple years | General support and research on AI alignment |
| Center for Human-Compatible AI (UC Berkeley) | 2016 onward | About $5.56 million founding grant, more over time | Stuart Russell's research group on alignment |
| Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | 2017 onward | Tens of millions over time | Operations support for AI safety researchers |
| Anthropic | 2022 | About $30 million reported under the AI focus area | Institutional grant to the AI safety lab (distinct from Moskovitz's personal 2021 Series A stake) |
| Redwood Research | 2021 onward | Tens of millions over multiple grants | Empirical alignment research |
| Alignment Research Center | 2021 onward | Multiple grants | Theoretical alignment work led by Paul Christiano |
| Center for AI Safety | 2022 onward | Multiple grants | Research and field building, including the 2023 statement on extinction risk |
| Global Priorities Institute (Oxford) | 2018 onward | More than $10 million | Academic philosophy and economics of long-term priorities |
| Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) | 2018 onward | Multiple grants | AI policy research |
| Cooperative AI Foundation | 2021 onward | Multiple grants | Research on multi-agent AI cooperation |
| Forethought (formerly Forethought Foundation) | 2018 onward | Multiple grants | Macrostrategy and longtermism research |
| METR (Model Evaluation and Threats Research, formerly ARC Evals) | 2022 onward | Multiple grants | Dangerous-capability evaluations of frontier models |
| Apollo Research | 2023 onward | Multiple grants | Interpretability and deceptive-behavior evaluations |
| MATS (ML Alignment & Theory Scholars) | 2022 onward | Multiple grants | Alignment-research training fellowships in Berkeley |
| Constellation (Berkeley research hub) | 2023 onward | Multiple grants | Office and operations for Bay Area alignment researchers |
| Long-Term Future Fund (EA Funds) | 2017 onward | Recurring grants | Regranting vehicle for small AI-safety and longtermism projects |
| Open Phil Technology Policy Fellowship | 2021 onward | Multiple grants | Salaries for AI policy fellows in U.S. federal agencies and Congress |
| Open Phil Century Fellowship | 2021 onward | Multiple grants | Five-year stipends for early-career AI safety researchers |
The most consequential of these has probably been the 2017 OpenAI grant. Open Philanthropy described the $30 million award, paid as $10 million a year for three years, as initiating a partnership in which Karnofsky would join OpenAI's board of directors and, jointly with one other board member, help oversee OpenAI's safety and governance work.[14] At the time, $10 million a year was a meaningful slice of OpenAI's nonprofit budget, and Open Philanthropy wrote that it expected the primary benefits to come from the partnership rather than from the money itself. Open Philanthropy has since written publicly about the difficulty of being a funder and a board observer at an organization whose mission and structure have shifted considerably since 2017. The grant also produced one of the most discussed conflicts of interest in the field: Karnofsky was engaged at the time to Daniela Amodei, an OpenAI executive who would go on to co-found Anthropic with her brother Dario in 2021. The Amodeis are now married, and Karnofsky left the OpenAI board in 2021. The conflict was disclosed.[14]
On the Anthropic side, the early money came from Moskovitz personally rather than from Open Philanthropy. He was named as a participant in Anthropic's $124 million Series A, announced on May 28, 2021 and led by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, alongside James McClave, the Center for Emerging Risk Research, and Eric Schmidt; the round valued the company at about $550 million.[18] He made the investment when Anthropic was a small AI safety lab and not yet the multi-billion-dollar Claude operator it has since become. Open Philanthropy's grants database separately records a 2022 institutional grant of about $30 million to Anthropic under the AI focus area, and reporting has described a much larger personal investment by Moskovitz in Anthropic's 2023 Series C, which Anthropic announced as a $450 million raise.[15][19] The personal stake is distinct from the institutional grant, although both reflect the same view that Anthropic is one of the more credible bets on a safety-focused frontier lab. Several Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures alumni now work at Anthropic, including Karnofsky himself, who joined the company in early 2025.
A non-trivial portion of the broader AI safety field, in other words, exists because of a single Florida-born software engineer who got rich on Facebook stock and then spent years asking the right people for advice on what to do about it.
Moskovitz is one of the most active billionaires on social media. He posts on his Threads/X account @moskov and has been unusually willing to engage in public arguments with Marc Andreessen, Vinod Khosla, and other figures who consider AI safety concerns overblown. His public position is direct: he believes that powerful general-purpose AI systems pose serious risks, including catastrophic and existential ones, and that those risks are sufficiently neglected by markets and governments to justify devoting most of his philanthropy to them. "I think these technologies are really dangerous," he said in October 2025, "I think we're going to have something pretty bad happen and I think that will cause a chilling effect."[13]
In February 2024 he met with President Biden at the White House to discuss AI safety. The meeting was first reported in the Washington Examiner and elsewhere, and was part of a broader pattern in which Open Philanthropy and the wider effective altruism community lobbied the Biden administration on AI policy and on the executive order that became 14110.[24]
In the October 2025 Stratechery interview with Ben Thompson (recorded October 10, published October 20), Moskovitz argued for a kind of "AI modesty" inside the enterprise: that the most useful applications of large language models inside companies right now are not autonomous agents replacing whole job functions but more boring assistive tools tightly bound to existing workflows. He pointed to his own use of coding assistants as the model, noting that "the magic of Claude Code is actually how the agent talks to the user," as distinct from "trying to have it fully do a pull request from start to finish."[13] He distinguished that operating posture from his philanthropic posture, where he treats the long-run trajectory of AI as the single most important issue he funds. The two views are not in tension: Asana sells reliable workflow software to enterprises, while Open Philanthropy bets on research that is supposed to matter mostly if AI systems become much more capable than they are today.
Moskovitz's wealth has come almost entirely from his Facebook stake and his Asana shares. Forbes named him the youngest self-made billionaire on its global list in 2011, when he was twenty-six and held about 2.34 percent of Facebook. The IPO of Facebook in 2012 valued that stake in the billions. He has been steadily divesting since.
As of April 2026, Forbes estimated his net worth at about $10.2 billion, and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index placed him near $11.6 billion.[6][26] The Bloomberg figure dropped sharply in May 2025 after public filings stopped confirming the size of his Asana ownership; before the adjustment, the same index had carried him close to $30 billion. The discrepancy gives a sense of how much depends on the value of his remaining Asana stake versus the value of holdings whose disclosure he is no longer required to make. According to the 2024 proxy statement and an April 2025 Form 4, he owns roughly 123 million shares of Asana stock, a slim majority of the company.
Good Ventures has reported giving more than $5 billion in cumulative grants by 2025, almost all of it routed through Open Philanthropy. The annual pace has trended upward sharply since 2017 and now sits north of $650 million per year.[22][23] Moskovitz and Tuna have said for years that they intend to spend the bulk of the fortune within their lifetimes and that they would rather err toward giving too quickly than too slowly.
Moskovitz met Cari Tuna in 2009. She was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau, working on technology coverage. They got engaged in 2012 and married in 2013, in a wedding that the couple kept extremely private. They have children together, and have generally declined to make their family life public.
Tuna has been the public face of their philanthropy for much of the last fifteen years. She left journalism to start Good Ventures in 2011 and was president of Open Philanthropy from its founding through 2021, then served as board chair. Time magazine named the couple to its 2025 TIME100 Philanthropy list and named Tuna to its TIME100 AI list in 2024.[20][21]
Moskovitz has been one of the largest individual Democratic donors in U.S. politics for the last decade. He gave roughly $20 million to support Hillary Clinton in 2016, about $24 million to support Joe Biden in 2020, and an estimated $48 million to support Kamala Harris in 2024, mostly through the Future Forward USA Action super PAC.[25] Some of these contributions were made through Asana under FEC corporate-giving rules. He has explained the donations as continuous with his philanthropy: he believes that government policy in the United States is the most important upstream lever for almost everything Open Philanthropy cares about, including AI policy, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness.