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I think values differences and a desire for control both play a role here, but I want to throw in another theory: sometimes this is a variant on an information problem that I see a lot these days and that seems hard to solve.
If someone tells me about an unusually good giving opportunity, I should be a bit skeptical because they might be wrong, but I don't need a heuristic to never even both looking into these things, because it's not like I'm told about them all the time.
And I basically don't need to consider the possibility that someone is just trying to systematically scam me, because I don't give enough to be worth that effort. But billionaires do hear this all the time, from tons of people -- and they do give enough to be worth deceiving.
So if a billionaire is told about GiveWell they have significantly less information than I have if I'm told about GiveWell, significantly more of an expected-adversarial relationship with whoever told them, and very high opportunity costs of their time.
There are new effective altruist billionaires! I recently wrote about new Giving Pledge signatory Ben Delo, who decided he wanted to give, connected with the Oxford EA community, and got caught up on the EA worldview + started giving within a few months.vox.com/2019/5/29/1863…
If that never happens we're definitely doing something wrong. But it probably won't happen every time just because it takes a lot to credibly tell a billionaire they should look into a new way to spend their money.
The general form of this problem is "when you know a true fact, you do not always have a great, or even a decent, way to convince strangers to believe it." The argument is long and complicated and people don't see why it's worth their time.
The institutions for elevating true arguments to public consensus don't work that great. Sometimes the best thing you can do is genuinely just to blog about stuff and hope you find the people it resonates with. Fixing this seems extremely important to me.
