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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Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home.
4 min
What’s still keeping American workers out of the office?
At a time when restaurants, planes and concert arenas are packed to the rafters, office buildings remain half full. Thinly populated cubicles and hallways are straining downtown economies and, bosses say, fragmenting corporate cultures as workers lose a sense of engagement.
Yet workers say high costs, caregiving duties, long commutes and days still scheduled full of Zooms are keeping them at home at least part of the time, along with a lingering sense that they’re able to do their jobs competently from anywhere. More than a dozen workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say they can’t envision returning to a five-day office routine, even if they’re missing career development or winding up on the company layoff list.
Managers say they will renew the push to get employees back into offices later this year. The share of companies planning to keep office attendance voluntary, rather than mandatory, is dropping, according to a survey released in May of more than 200 corporate real-estate executives conducted by property-services firm CBRE, one of the largest managers of U.S. office space.
A battle of wills could be ahead. The gap between what employees and bosses want remains wide, with bosses expecting in-person collaboration and workers loath to forgo flexibility, according to monthly surveys of worker sentiment maintained by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who studies remote work.
Escalating expenses
One reason workers say they’re reluctant to return is money. Some who have lost remote-work privileges said they are spending hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars each month on meals, commutes and child care.
One supercommuter who treks to her Manhattan job from her home in Philadelphia negotiated a two-day-a-week limit to her New York office time this year. Otherwise, she said she could easily spend $10,000 a year on Amtrak tickets if she commuted five days a week.
Christos Berger, a 25-year-old mortgage-loan assistant who lives outside Washington, D.C., estimates she spends $2,100 on child care and $450 on gas monthly now that she is working up to three days a week in the office.
Berger and her husband juggled parenting duties when they were fully remote. The cost of office life has her contemplating a big ask: clearance to work from home full time.
“Companies are pushing you to be available at night, be available on weekends,” she said, adding that she feels employers aren’t taking into account parents’ need for family time.
Rachel Cottam, a 31-year-old head of content for a tech company, works full time from her home near Salt Lake City, making the occasional out-of-town trip to headquarters. She used to be a high-school teacher, spending weekdays in the classroom. Back then, she and her husband spent $100 a week on child care and $70 a week on gas. Now they save that money. She even let her car insurance company know she no longer commutes and they knocked $5 a month off the bill.
Friends who have been recalled to offices tell Cottam about the added cost of coffee, lunch and beauty supplies. They also talk about the emotional cost they feel from losing work flexibility.
“For them, it feels like this great ‘future of work’ they’ve been gifted is suddenly ripped away,” she said.
Parent trade-offs
If pandemic-era flexible schedules go away, a huge number of parents will drop out of the workforce, workers say.
When Meghan Skornia, a 36-year-old urban planner and married mother of an 18-month-old son, was looking for a new job last year, she weeded out job openings with strict in-office policies. Were she given such mandates, she said, she would consider becoming an independent consultant.
The firm in Portland, Ore., where Skornia now works requests one day a week in the office, but doesn’t dictate which day. The arrangement lets her spend time with her son and juggle her job duties, she said. “If I were in the office five days a week, I wouldn’t really ever see my son, except for weekends.”
Emotional labor
For some, coming into the office means donning a mask to fit in.
Kenneth Thomas, 42, said he left his investment-firm job in the summer of 2021 when the company insisted that workers return to the office full time. Thomas, who describes himself as a 6-foot-2 Black man, said managing how he was perceived—not slipping into slang or inadvertently appearing threatening through body language—made the office workday exhausting. He said that other professionals of colour have told him they feel similarly isolated at work.
“When I was working from home, it freed up so much of my mental bandwidth,” he said. His current job, treasurer of a green-energy company, allows him to work remotely two or three days a week.
Lost productivity
The longer the commute, the less likely workers are to return to offices.
Ryan Koch, a Berkeley, Calif., resident, went to his San Francisco office two days a week as required late last year, but then he let his attendance slide, because commuting to an office felt pointless. “I’m doing the same video calls that I can be doing at home,” he said.
Koch, who works in sales, said his nonattendance wasn’t noted so long as his numbers were good. When Koch and other colleagues were unable to meet sales quotas in recent weeks, they were laid off. Ignoring the in-office requirement probably didn’t help, he said, adding he hopes to land a new hybrid role where he goes in one or two days.
Jess Goodwin, a 36-year-old media-marketing professional, turned down an offer to go from freelance to full time earlier this year because the role required office time and no change in pay.
Goodwin said a manager “made it really clear that this is what they’re mandating right now and it could change in the future to ‘you have to be back in five days a week.’”
Goodwin, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., calculated that subway commutes to Midtown Manhattan would consume more than 150 hours annually, in addition to time spent getting ready for work.
Goodwin’s holding out for a better offer. She said she would consider a hybrid position if it came with a generous package and good commute, adding: “And I would also probably need something in my contract being like, ‘We’re not going to increase the number of days you have to come in.’”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
