Elon Musk asks for suggestions on how to spend $190 billion. So among the 28,000 responses I'm sure you'll notice my suggestion, "Do a UBI program for open-source developers, so that any developer who is making free software can do it at minimum wage." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347356316763705344

I like Alan Kay’s thesis that capital allocation is a skill just like programming or drawing. A good way might be to give the $ to ‘good’ capital allocators. That could be private investors, foundations, or heck even the NIH if you think they’re investing in ways that align with your values

That's interesting. So a professional non-profit allocator group like VCs or Angels of the non-profit world.

yeah I mean, depends what you’re optimizing for I guess but if you believe its a skill then giving funds to people who have a track record is one way to “maximize your ROI”. Even if your goal is vaguely “impact”, which foundations are better at this in some quantitative way (still limited but better than nothing). Gates foundation for example talks about ‘saving a life with $1k’ as their yardstick. There’s a nonprofit that ranks impact by $, forgot the name of it…

UBI has benefits beyond measurable ROI though. You could do both...

yeah definitely!

The thing I like this 'minimum wage' approach is that it fills a gap in traditional funding models, where ordinarily you have to prove to someone else - maybe a government bureaucrat, maybe a tenured professor, maybe Y Combinator, maybe randos on KickStarter, depending - that your idea is a good one. And if your idea doesn't involve making a profit or publishing a peer-reviewed academic paper whilst earning a PhD, most of your options disappear. But often people with good ideas (as well as bad ideas, mind you) believe in something a lot but they don't know how to articulate the idea to others. So I would propose that if you've got an idea, you should be able to work on it, at least for some period of time, without first proving its merits in a grant application. You need only prove, somehow, that you are doing work and not playing video games or whatever. It would probably work best if there is some minimum experience level (e.g. Master's degree or 2 years industry experience) so that the worker isn't clueless, and a sort of coach or mentor who is paid at market rate to facilitate - to make sure each worker is aware of prior art to avoid duplication, to connect workers with each other if they could logically work together, to provide moral support... and the fact that the pay is low should discourage participation of 'normal' people, who will invariably choose to work in industry instead. This is good - I don't expect much from normal people, and low pay implies more workers can share the same pile of cash. But there's no way I can get Musk to read this. P.S. there's little reason to restrict the fund to software developers, but hardware engineers, chemists etc. presumably need extra money for equipment.