Comment by Viliam1234

One problem is, making $300k annually and donating $200k of it to charitable causes such as curing malaria does not make an interesting story. Maybe it saved thousands of lives, maybe not, but we can't even point at specific people who were saved... and malaria still exists, so... not an interesting story to tell.

A more exciting story would be e.g. about Scott Alexander, who was harassed by a Wikipedia admin and lost his job because he was doxed by a major newspaper, but emerged stronger than before (that's the interesting part), and he also keeps donating a fraction of his income to charitable causes (that's the charitable part, i.e. the boring part).

Most rationalists' success stories are less extreme than this. Most of them wouldn't make good clickbait.