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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Earning to Give vs. Altruistic Career Choice Revisited - Less Wrong
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Well, if James Simons wanted to retire from Renaissance and work on FAI full-time, it would not be entirely obvious to me that this was a bad move, but only if Simons had enough in the bank to also pay as much other top-flight math talent as could reasonably be used, and was already so paying, such that there was no marginal return to his further earning power relative to existing funds.
This situation has not yet arisen. Unfortunately.
I think that James Simons is an example of someone with an unusually strong comparative advantage at making money. But this wouldn't necessarily have been clear a priori: if you put yourself in Simons' shoes in 1980 the expected earnings of going into finance would be much lower than his actual earnings turned out to be. So it's not clear that he would have done better to "earn to give" than doing something of direct humanitarian value (though maybe it was clear from the outset that his comparative advantage was in finance.)