How Caroline Ellison Found Herself at the Centre of the FTX Crypto Collapse
As CEO of Alameda Research, Ms. Ellison took a leading role in helping Sam Bankman-Fried build the FTX empire
5 min
On a video call in early November, employees at Alameda Research dialled in to learn the fate of the trading firm, which was teetering on the brink.
It was up to Caroline Ellison to deliver the bad news. Alameda was at the centre of Sam Bankman-Fried‘s collapsing FTX empire. Ms. Ellison, who had just turned 28, was at the centre of Alameda. And they were all in crisis.
Alameda and crypto exchange FTX were both the brainchild of Ms. Ellison’s friend Mr. Bankman-Fried, and he had picked her to help lead Alameda the year before. For a time, they rode the crypto wave together, with FTX eventually notching a blockbuster valuation of $32 billion. This month, it all came crashing down in a matter of days.
Customers had grown fearful about the companies’ financial health, yanking their money from FTX in a short, frenzied period. The firms scrambled to stay afloat, but they filed for bankruptcy shortly after Ms. Ellison’s call with employees. Mr. Bankman-Fried resigned as FTX’s chief executive.
Prosecutors, regulators and even FTX’s new CEO are investigating what happened. Customers are losing hope they will ever see their money again. Lawsuits have followed, and many top employees have left. Ms. Ellison has been fired along with Gary Wang and Nishad Singh. They were also top deputies of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s.
Before the crash, Mr. Bankman-Fried hugged the spotlight, promoting crypto and lobbying for its interests in Washington, while Ms. Ellison remained in the engine room. Alameda, a trading firm owned almost entirely by Mr. Bankman-Fried, had one overarching purpose: Make money. Ms. Ellison was tasked with keeping it running.
In a handful of podcasts and other public appearances, Ms. Ellison was quick to summarise her rapid ascent as almost accidental. She joined Wall Street straight from graduating Stanford University in 2016, though the move was less a calling than an answer to the question she found herself asking in college: What are math majors supposed to do with their lives, anyway?
It was at her first job, at the quant-trading powerhouse Jane Street Capital, that she met another 20-something trader, Mr. Bankman-Fried. Like her, he had been raised by two professors. Like her, he spoke highly of a movement called “effective altruism,” or the idea of making big money to give away.
When Mr. Bankman-Fried left to start Alameda, Ms. Ellison soon followed in what she called “a blind leap into the unknown.” She was still barely out of college—but she was also one of the more experienced traders there, she said in an FTX podcast in 2020.
Caroline Ellison grew up in the Boston suburbs, the daughter of two MIT economists. At 5, she read the second “Harry Potter” book to herself, she said on the podcast. At 8, she wrote an analysis of stuffed-animal prices, according to Forbes. Her father, inspired by his daughters, wrote advanced-math textbooks for children bored by basic lessons.
She and Messrs. Bankman-Fried, Wang and Singh comprised the board of what they called the Future Fund, with the goal of making grants to nonprofits and investments in “socially impactful companies.” Critics say the effective altruism worldview can encourage excessive risk-taking—since people can always argue that bigger paydays lead to bigger donations.
Messrs. Bankman-Fried, Wang and Singh all owned stakes in at least some of the FTX companies, according to a filing in bankruptcy court by the new CEO.
At times, Ms. Ellison and Mr. Bankman-Fried were romantically involved, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
When Ms. Ellison arrived at Alameda, she was surprised at how it made even fast-paced Jane Street look slow. “It was like, wow, the process for doing things is just someone suggests something and then someone codes it up and releases it,” she said in the FTX podcast. “An hour later and it’s already happened.”
Everything in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s orbit seemed to move at the same breakneck speed. He launched an Alameda sister firm, FTX, in 2019, and it took just a few years for it to become one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world. For a while, Mr. Bankman-Fried was CEO of both companies.
Use of stimulants was common among his upper echelon, the Journal previously reported.
“Nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is,” Ms. Ellison tweeted last year.
Alameda and FTX had employees in both Hong Kong and the Bahamas. Ms. Ellison, like Mr. Bankman-Fried, had recently been working from the Bahamas much of the time, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Among Alameda’s trading strategies was arbitrage—buying a coin in one location and selling it elsewhere for more. FTX, meanwhile, emerged as a key marketplace for investors large and small to buy and sell crypto. As a major player in digital currencies, Alameda traded frequently on FTX’s platform.
Around 2020, Alameda began “yield farming,” investing in tokens that pay interest-rate-like rewards. At first, Ms. Ellison pushed back. In an FTX podcast in early 2021, she recalled arguing about whether the firm should engage, and said she had concerns about the riskiness. “I lost that argument,” she said in the podcast.
Over time, Alameda’s aggressive trading strategies relied more on intuition and indicators like Elon Musk’s social-media posts, according to tweets in 2021 by Sam Trabucco, then another rising star at Alameda.
By fall 2021, cryptocurrency prices were approaching their all-time high and FTX was celebrating its recent deal for the naming rights of the University of California, Berkeley’s football stadium. Mr. Bankman-Fried named Ms. Ellison and Mr. Trabucco as co-CEOs to run Alameda so he could focus on FTX. They inherited a 25-person operation, according to Alameda’s press release at the time.
Though Mr. Bankman-Fried was no longer CEO, Alameda was still his company, too. According to FTX’s bankruptcy filings, he owned 90% of the trading firm. Mr. Wang owned the other 10%.
By early 2022, digital currencies were in free fall. Many of the industry’s biggest investment and lending firms began to buckle, then give way. As panic swept through the crypto world, Mr. Bankman-Fried sought to appear as a rescuer, buying out some troubled firms and extending credit to others to help stabilise the market.
Behind the scenes, though, Alameda was far from immune from the shakeout. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s vaunted trading firm was getting margin calls, too.
In August of this year, Mr. Trabucco said he was stepping down as co-CEO. In a lengthy Twitter thread, he said working at Alameda had been “difficult and exhausting and consuming.”
By early November, the spotlight that Mr. Bankman-Fried so often courted began to reveal his companies’ troubles. A CoinDesk report raised concerns about the financial health of Alameda and FTX. Changpeng Zhao, head of rival exchange Binance, tweeted that his firm would dump its holdings of FTT as a risk-management move. FTT is a digital currency of FTX.
As Mr. Zhao and Mr. Bankman-Fried sparred over Twitter, Ms. Ellison tried to cool the fire. “If you’re looking to minimise the market impact on your FTT sales, Alameda will happily buy it all from you today at $22!” she tweeted, tagging Mr. Zhao. A few minutes before, FTT had traded around $22.15, according to CoinDesk data.
When asked on Twitter why Ms. Ellison had made the offer, Mr. Bankman-Fried replied, “I mean that’s up to her to answer, but they said they were worried about impact which this would solve for them, and this is just quicker and easier.” Binance contacted her about the offer but never heard back, the Journal reported.
Ultimately, the close ties between Alameda and FTX were their undoing. FTX used customer money to lend billions of dollars to Alameda for risky trades and investments, according to previous reporting by the Journal. In traditional finance, regulators require brokerages to segregate customer funds from any capital they use for trading.
In the video meeting in early November, held late in the evening Hong Kong time, Ms. Ellison told employees that FTX used customer money to help Alameda meet its liabilities, the Journal previously reported. She apologised and said that she had disappointed the staff, the Journal reported. By then, the companies’ financial problems had spilled into public view, but the companies hadn’t yet filed for bankruptcy,
Ms. Ellison also told employees that she, Messrs. Bankman-Fried, Singh and Wang were aware of the decision to send customer money to Alameda.
Many Alameda employees quit the next day, the Journal reported.
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The marketplace has spoken and, at least for now, it’s showing preference for hybrids and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) over battery electrics. That makes Toyota’s foot dragging on EVs (and full speed ahead on hybrids) look fairly wise, though the timeline along a bumpy road still gets us to full electrification by 2035.
Italian supercar producer Lamborghini, in business since 1963, is also proceeding, incrementally, toward battery power. In an interview, Federico Foschini , Lamborghini’s chief global marketing and sales officer, talked about the new Urus SE plug-in hybrid the company showed at its lounge in New York on Monday.
Lamborghini
The Urus SE SUV will sell for US$258,000 in the U.S. (the company’s biggest market) when it goes on sale internationally in the first quarter of 2025, Foschini says.
“We’re using the contribution from the electric motor and battery to not only lower emissions but also to boost performance,” he says. “Next year, all three of our models [the others are the Revuelto, a PHEV from launch, and the continuation of the Huracán] will be available as PHEVs.”
The Euro-spec Urus SE will have a stated 37 miles of electric-only range, thanks to a 192-horsepower electric motor and a 25.9-kilowatt-hour battery, but that distance will probably be less in stricter U.S. federal testing. In electric mode, the SE can reach 81 miles per hour. With the 4-litre 620-horsepower twin-turbo V8 engine engaged, the picture is quite different. With 789 horsepower and 701 pound-feet of torque on tap, the SE—as big as it is—can reach 62 mph in 3.4 seconds and attain 193 mph. It’s marginally faster than the Urus S, but also slightly under the cutting-edge Urus Performante model. Lamborghini says the SE reduces emissions by 80% compared to a standard Urus.
Lamborghini’s Urus plans are a little complicated. The company’s order books are full through 2025, but after that it plans to ditch the S and Performante models and produce only the SE. That’s only for a year, however, because the all-electric Urus should arrive by 2029.
Lamborghini
Thanks to the electric motor, the Urus SE offers all-wheel drive. The motor is situated inside the eight-speed automatic transmission, and it acts as a booster for the V8 but it can also drive the wheels on its own. The electric torque-vectoring system distributes power to the wheels that need it for improved cornering. The Urus SE has six driving modes, with variations that give a total of 11 performance options. There are carbon ceramic brakes front and rear.
To distinguish it, the Urus SE gets a new “floating” hood design and a new grille, headlights with matrix LED technology and a new lighting signature, and a redesigned bumper. There are more than 100 bodywork styling options, and 47 interior color combinations, with four embroidery types. The rear liftgate has also been restyled, with lights that connect the tail light clusters. The rear diffuser was redesigned to give 35% more downforce (compared to the Urus S) and keep the car on the road.
The Urus represents about 60% of U.S. Lamborghini sales, Foschini says, and in the early years 80% of buyers were new to the brand. Now it’s down to 70%because, as Foschini says, some happy Urus owners have upgraded to the Performante model. Lamborghini sold 3,000 cars last year in the U.S., where it has 44 dealers. Global sales were 10,112, the first time the marque went into five figures.
The average Urus buyer is 45 years old, though it’s 10 years younger in China and 10 years older in Japan. Only 10% are women, though that percentage is increasing.
“The customer base is widening, thanks to the broad appeal of the Urus—it’s a very usable car,” Foschini says. “The new buyers are successful in business, appreciate the technology, the performance, the unconventional design, and the fun-to-drive nature of the Urus.”
Maserati has two SUVs in its lineup, the Levante and the smaller Grecale. But Foschini says Lamborghini has no such plans. “A smaller SUV is not consistent with the positioning of our brand,” he says. “It’s not what we need in our portfolio now.”
It’s unclear exactly when Lamborghini will become an all-battery-electric brand. Foschini says that the Italian automaker is working with Volkswagen Group partner Porsche on e-fuel, synthetic and renewably made gasoline that could presumably extend the brand’s internal-combustion identity. But now, e-fuel is very expensive to make as it relies on wind power and captured carbon dioxide.
During Monterey Car Week in 2023, Lamborghini showed the Lanzador , a 2+2 electric concept car with high ground clearance that is headed for production. “This is the right electric vehicle for us,” Foschini says. “And the production version will look better than the concept.” The Lanzador, Lamborghini’s fourth model, should arrive in 2028.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
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