It seems a little ironic that you cite the support of a very high status person (who, being high status, likely has status-seeking tendencies to some degree or another) as evidence that an organization will not be corrupted by status-seeking. If you're a supporter of Bostrom's work, it seems worth noting that he's managed to become pretty high-status in the process of doing it.

Also, what evidence is there for Eliezer's "dumb amoeba" model of academia? My impression is also that many people go in to academia precisely because they are interested in doing research that interests them for its own sake rather than seeking status and compensation in the for-profit sector. For example, this programmer writes about various paths to a "unicorn job", where you get paid to work on things you're curious about, and why he estimated that academia was the best path to such a job. Regardless of whether the "dumb amoeba" model is correct, it seems like academia has produced a lot of valuable stuff in other domains, and I'm curious if you think that x-risk is going to be an unusual domain for some reason or another.