Alameda Research

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman  · 17 Jul 2023  · 329pp  · 99,504 words

very small group of important players like crypto mogul Justin Sun, who issued a token called TRON, along with sophisticated trading firms like Cumberland and Alameda Research, the Bahamas-based outfit owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, known in the crypto world (and now beyond) as SBF. Those players then gambled with the

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million of its own CEL tokens, then later used the exchange to liquidate millions of dollars of customers’ assets. Celsius’s bankruptcy proceedings also revealed Alameda Research as one of its biggest creditors, owing Sam’s firm $12.8 million. Another firm that Bankman-Fried had ties to, the Pharos USD Fund

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be made exploiting the difference—buy Bitcoin in the United States, sell it in South Korea, pocket the difference. He started his own trading firm, Alameda Research, to take advantage of it. Sam recruited a few close friends from MIT, including roommate Gary Wang, whom he had known since meeting him in

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up. Eventually the kimchi premium dried up, but there were still massive inefficiencies to be exploited in the nascent crypto market. In 2019, Sam moved Alameda Research to Hong Kong in search of a more favorable regulatory environment. Hong Kong benefited from being close to mainland China, where cryptocurrency had exploded in

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proceeds? The second was his company’s deep ties to Tether. In November 2021, Protos, a crypto media company renowned for its skepticism, revealed that Alameda Research was one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) customers of Tether. The notoriously shady stablecoin company had printed $36.7 billion for Alameda. We

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friend of Sam’s brother. Gary Wang, FTX’s cofounder, had known Bankman-Fried since math camp in high school. Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, worked with him at Jane Street. Caroline and Sam occasionally dated. All nine of the roommates were thirty years old or less. Another troubling aspect

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talk, and I was there to listen. He reacted with another heart emoji, and then, simply: “100%.” On August 25, Sam Trabucco, co-CEO of Alameda Research, resigned. He said he wanted to spend more time with his boat, Soak My Deck. Typical for crypto: Even their puns sucked. “Why are journalists

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Alameda/FTX. Two days later, our friend Dirty Bubble Media, aka James Block, who helped expose the Celsius fraud, published an ominously titled post, “Is Alameda Research Insolvent?” He had gotten ahold of the Alameda balance sheet before it leaked and had time to analyze it. A few days earlier, the prospect

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hell broke loose as FTT began to slide in price. Sam and his lieutenants desperately tried to right the ship. Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, tweeted publicly at CZ, offering to buy all of his FTT for twenty-two dollars per token. It was a bizarre way to do business

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various theories, but the most compelling one was that it had never really been very profitable to begin with. Recall that the initial focus of Alameda Research was exploiting the Kimchi Premium, the difference in the price of Bitcoin in Korea and other Asian markets versus the United States. As lore would

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moved to Hong Kong, and FTX was born the following year. Via customer deposits on FTX, Sam received incoming cash to fund his operations, and Alameda Research began providing market making services on the exchange, effectively serving as a middleman between buyers and sellers. Market making can be a profitable business, but

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: “You use very little math. You use a lot of elementary school math.” In 2021, Sam explained to a podcaster how he chose the name Alameda Research to obscure the company’s true nature from regulators: “If we named our company, like, Shitcoin Day Traders Inc., they’d probably just reject us

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turned south and investors wanted their real money back. At least $8 billion in FTX customer funds were used to bail out losses incurred from Alameda Research’s wild speculation. Yet even committing that blatant act of fraud—commingling funds is illegal—was not enough to plug the hole, as Alameda had

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. Where did the money go? According to the bankruptcy filings, Alameda loaned some $4.1 billion to “related parties.” Sam loaned himself $1 billion from Alameda Research, a company he owned 90 percent of. Alameda also lent $2.3 billion to Paper Bird Inc. and Euclid Way Ltd., entities he controlled, as

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result. The similarities didn’t end there: Madoff ran a legitimate market making business in addition to his fraudulent one. Did Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research serve the equivalent role, or had it been a con from the beginning? While Madoff could be depicted as an isolated villain, albeit a pretty

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-frieds-crypto-empire-blur-on-his-trading-titan-alamedas-balance-sheet/. 220 an ominously titled post: James Block, “Is Alameda Research Insolvent?,” Dirty Bubble Media, November 4, 2022, https://dirtybubblemedia.substack.com/p/is-alameda-research-insolvent. 223 Sam signed over control: MacKenzie Sigalos, “Sam Bankman-Fried steps down as FTX CEO as his

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Salvador Passes Law Allowing Bitcoin Bond Issuance,” Bloomberg, January 11, 2023. INDEX Adams, Eric addiction Adventures in the Screen Trade (Goldman) Ahamed, Liaquat Ahmed, Fawaz Alameda Research Alexander, Carol Allen, Hilary Antminer Bitcoin mining machines Ardoino, Paolo asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) Atwood, Margaret Auchincloss, Jake Axie Infinity Axios Bankman, Joseph Bankman

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis  · 2 Oct 2023  · 263pp  · 92,618 words

billion dollars might this guy be worth? In addition to the crypto exchange, FTX, Sam also owned and controlled a crypto quant trading firm called Alameda Research. The year before, 2020, with just a handful of employees, Alameda had generated a billion dollars in trading profits, and was accumulating stakes in

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other companies, and crypto tokens, at a bewildering rate. The closer you got to Alameda Research, the less it seemed like a hedge fund and the more it resembled a dragon’s lair, stuffed with random treasures. The Forbes wealth analysts

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fortunes, the Forbes approach to wealth only got you so far. What to do, for instance, with the Solana tokens Sam owned inside of Alameda Research? Hardly anyone knew what Solana was—­a new crypto­currency minted to rival Bitcoin—­much less how to value it. On the one hand, the

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As it turned out, Eric Mannes did not love her—­which, though sad in its way, freed up Caroline to quit Jane Street and join Alameda Research. Quitting Jane Street wasn’t as painless as Caroline thought it would be. First-­year traders whom Jane Street had just paid $200,000 didn

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seventy million dollars that might otherwise go to effective altruism could simply go poof. That thought terrified the other four effective altruists in charge of Alameda Research. One evening, Tara argued heatedly with Sam until he caved and agreed to what she thought was a reasonable compromise: he could turn on

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was a net negative.” It occurred to Nishad that the effective altruist’s relationship to money was more than a little bizarre. Basically all of Alameda Research’s employees and investors were committed to giving all their money away to roughly the same charitable causes. You might surmise that they wouldn’t

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it out. The dust had settled on what was being called The Schism, and only Sam was still ruminating on the meaning of it all. Alameda Research had righted itself and was consistently profitable. All was not right with Caroline, however. Which was why she was now writing to her boss.

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it comes out conflict of interest stuff work-­related tensions She ended by wondering if she might not be better off quitting her job at Alameda Research and cutting off all contact with Sam. On the other hand . . . It would be ideal if Sam and I could have a discussion to

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issued you a pseudonym when you started doing business with them. One of the biggest exchanges at the time, BitMEX, had bestowed fictitious names upon Alameda Research’s trading accounts, each consisting of three seemingly randomly generated words. Shell-­Paper-­Bird was one. Hot-­Relic-­Fancier was another—­and so weirdly funny

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dollars to donate and the number of dollars that he was able to generate as a crypto trader. In 2018, trading $40 million in capital, Alameda Research had generated $30 million in profits. Their effective altruist investors took half, leaving behind $15 million. Five million of that was lost to payroll and

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was a genius. In Hong Kong, Sam and his small team began to pitch the billionaire founders of existing exchanges on the idea of paying Alameda Research (Gary) to create a crypto exchange, different in important ways from any that existed. Alameda would supply the technology; the existing exchanges would supply

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happiness in mind that, in the late spring of 2020, he’d plugged “crypto” and “Berkeley” into LinkedIn. He’d received a single result: Alameda Research. He’d never heard of it. He sent in his résumé. Within minutes he received a Zoom invitation from Sam Bankman-­Fried—­who wanted to

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talk to him not about Alameda but about a new crypto exchange that Alameda Research had launched, called FTX. The numbers coming out of Sam’s mouth via Zoom shocked Ramnik, as did Sam’s willingness to disclose them

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the business. And yet FTX was just a piece of a much larger puzzle of Sam’s design. He owned 90 percent of Alameda Research. And the nature of Alameda Research was changing. It was still a quant trading firm, with its good months and bad months, but its traders were playing, in

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for instance, Genesis Global Capital or Celsius Network, and receive some rate of interest, and these pseudobanks would re-lend the crypto to traders like Alameda Research. In early 2018, rich effective altruists had charged Sam interest rates of 50 percent a year. Three years later, Genesis and Celsius were willing to

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lend billions to Alameda Research at interest rates that ranged from 6 to 20 percent. And there were other, even more mysterious billions inside of Alameda that no one knew

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about. “FTX is smaller than people think, and Alameda is bigger,” said Ramnik. “Way bigger.” It was never clear where Alameda Research stopped and FTX started. Legally separate companies, they were both owned by the same person. They occupied the same big room on the twenty-­sixth

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what he was doing. FTT “has single-­handedly fixed [Alameda’s] equity problem,” he wrote, in a memo to employees. He retained 90 percent of Alameda Research, with Gary owning the remaining 10 percent. Even after he’d sold stakes in FTX to the one hundred fifty venture capitalists, Sam still owned

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be embarrassed for people to know we were dating. Their deep interests remained unaligned. Caroline sensed that, even as Sam promoted her to CEO of Alameda Research, he disapproved of her job performance—­and she shared his opinion. “It feels like I’m doing a much worse job managing Alameda than you

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-­up to the follow-­up, “and I’m going to fuck up important things if you don’t step in sometimes.” Eighteen months earlier, Alameda Research had been limping along with $40 million in capital from a handful of effective altruist friends. It now had billions in it, much of it

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interest in his patients. Gabe Bankman-­Fried, Sam’s younger brother, was the first, but hard on his heels came Caroline Ellison and others from Alameda Research. By the time Sam arrived, a year later, George was treating maybe twenty EAs. As a group, they eased a worry George had about

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the newly elected prime minister. “Sam, we’re broke,” the prime minister confessed. Sam wasn’t broke. Just then Sam was the opposite of broke. Alameda Research was no longer paying loan shark interest rates to borrow tens of millions of dollars from effective altruists. The new crypto lenders like Celsius and

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Genesis were willing to hand Alameda Research collectively between $10 billion and $15 billion at rates as low as 6 percent. The rate of return inside Alameda was steadily declining, but

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make the point, Sam, having taken $200 million from Sequoia Capital in exchange for a piece of FTX, turned around and invested $200 million from Alameda Research in one of Sequoia’s funds.) FTX was now the world’s fastest-­growing crypto exchange, and the casino of choice for big professional traders

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buying from Binance. Sam loved this sort of thing: it was Jane Street trading all over again. In response, he had his traders at Alameda Research build their own, faster bots. Alameda’s bots inserted offers a tiny bit cheaper than the offers from Binance bots. The Binance bot would offer

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noted, were East Asian women. Then there was Caroline Ellison. Caroline was apparently alone in charge of the twenty-­two traders and developers working inside Alameda Research, about half of whom had followed Sam from Hong Kong to the Bahamas. This surprised George a bit. “She never said anything about Alameda,”

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, hardly anyone other than the few EAs Caroline had shared the secret of the relationship with had been aware that the CEOs of FTX and Alameda Research were romantically involved. “People never see what they’re not looking for,” said Sam. Now they didn’t see that the romance had ended.

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that had no obvious connection to crypto, like the studio that had developed Storybook Brawl. The money nearly always came not from FTX but from Alameda Research, which Ramnik and everyone else thought of as Sam’s private fund. Often Ramnik was intimately involved with a purchase, but nearly as often he

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was gone, and crypto was in a souped-­up version of an old-­fashioned financial crisis. In late June, the second-­biggest hedge fund after Alameda Research, Three Arrows Capital, had blown up. The banks and sort of banks had suffered runs and collapsed. Unlike in a traditional finance crisis, there

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of cars had been abandoned, keys still inside them, in the Bahamas airport lot. It made for a bizarre scene: panicked employees of FTX and Alameda Research struggling to escape against an incoming tide of oblivious tourists in flip-­flops and floral shirts. As they passed one another in the terminal, giant

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crypto news site CoinDesk published an article about a curious document that appeared to have been leaked to them by someone inside Alameda Research, or perhaps someone who lent money to Alameda Research. It wasn’t a formal balance sheet. There was no sign that it had been audited, or that it presented a

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of Eric Mannes, Caroline Ellison’s former boyfriend at Jane Street. The previous month, the couple had visited the Bahamas and stayed with employees of Alameda Research at Albany: Had the leak somehow originated inside the company? There was also the frisson that came with catching even a glimpse of the dragon

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screaming, “Will you please fucking stop playing Storybook Brawl?!” Nothing any of them was saying made sense to Ramnik. Though Caroline was in charge of Alameda Research, she seemed totally clueless about where its money was. She’d come onto the screen and announce that she had found $200 million here, or

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up their mess. The Bahamas had moved to put FTX into liquidation the day before Sam signed the papers declaring bankruptcy in the United States. Alameda Research and the small US exchange were incorporated in Delaware. FTX’s bigger international crypto exchange, where the vast majority of the trading occurred, had been

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women in the Conch Shack kitchen. Constance had already gotten her hands on a small stack of what amounted to classified documents from FTX and Alameda Research. Quinn had just returned from a failed attempt to retrieve fresh vegetables from the houses and apartments around the island previously occupied by FTX employees

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heard of. Back in late 2018, she’d been working in Huobi’s Singapore office when the exchange had either frozen or misplaced some of Alameda Research’s money. “They don’t speak Chinese, and customer support does not speak English,” said Constance. “They found me, and they found their magic

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from Alameda. Or that Sam’s investments were making a ton of money.” The next document in her stack was a rough balance sheet of Alameda Research that differed in important ways from the rough balance sheet that had inspired the CoinDesk article now being credited with bringing down the entire business

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exchanges. No single trader was allowed to lose so much money that it put the exchange, and everyone who traded on it, at risk. For Alameda Research, however, an exception had been made. Sam’s private trading firm was allowed to lose, in effect, infinity dollars before its trades were liquidated. “

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in the United States had been willing to offer its services to a new international crypto exchange. The crypto entities that they did bank, like Alameda Research, usually disguised their association with crypto. The biggest US crypto exchange, Coinbase, had by some miracle persuaded Silicon Valley Bank to give it an

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name, FTX had no straightforward way to accept dollar deposits. In Sam’s telling, the dollars sent in by customers that had accumulated inside of Alameda Research had simply never been moved. Until July 2021, there was no other place to put them, as FTX had no US dollar bank accounts.

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that, right up until at least June 2022, this fact, which others now found so shocking, hadn’t attracted his attention. He wasn’t managing Alameda Research; Caroline was. Toward the end of 2021, when the flow of new dollars into the fiat@ account trickled to nothing—­as customers could now deposit

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their dollars directly onto FTX, through a US bank—­Alameda Research had a net asset value of $100 billion. That number was of course wildly unreliable, as it was simply the market value of lots

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$19,000. Entering that summer, the relative importance to Alameda of the $8.8 billion had skyrocketed. But Sam wasn’t managing the risk inside Alameda Research, according to him. Caroline was. Perhaps because he and Caroline were barely speaking by that point, she hadn’t bothered to raise, directly with him

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to his story. But she refused to believe it. She suspected that he was omitting some big, important fact—­say, a sudden trading loss inside Alameda Research that had caused him to actively grab customers’ money and move it into Alameda. “It is crazy,” she said. “He made me try to

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own dollars from her personal bank account onto FTX, she’d needed to wire it not directly to FTX but to various accounts owned by Alameda Research. Some of the dollars inside fiat@ had been hers. For the better part of the month, I watched Constance return from her encounters with

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as FTX’s lawyers when the exchange had gone before US regulators to answer questions like: Are there any conflicts of interest between FTX and Alameda Research? Sam had never heard of John Ray, and he hadn’t wanted to sign the bankruptcy papers. Or rather, there had been a period

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.’ I’m like, Fuck no.” Within a few weeks, Ray had fired pretty much everyone with deep knowledge of whatever had happened inside FTX and Alameda Research. He could think of but one exception. “I think they’re still paying the psychiatrist,” said Ray. That was in early 2023. By late

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I actually know what that is, and it isn’t what you think.” At some point his team discovered that a Hong Kong subsidiary of Alameda Research called Cottonwood Grove had bought vast sums of FTT, for example. To the innocent archaeologist, it was evidence of Sam’s World artificially propping up

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thing you would say if you knew the secret they were hiding: the customers’ deposits that are supposed to be inside FTX are actually inside Alameda Research. The authorities in the Bahamas had jailed Sam and after a lot of the usual Sam-­induced complications extradited him to the United States. In

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about it. Zane Tackett, for instance, could not understand why, toward the end of 2021, Sam hadn’t simply replaced the customers’ deposits inside of Alameda Research with loans from the crypto banks. Back then, Alameda could have borrowed $25–­$30 billion without much trouble. Why not take that money and move

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux  · 11 Sep 2023  · 385pp  · 106,848 words

to buy them back. Among the buyers were EOS, the ICO promoted by Tether co-founder Brock Pierce; and Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund Alameda Research. Devasini had essentially printed his own money to replace what was lost by Crypto Capital and sold it to the biggest players in the crypto

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become the most prominent crypto booster of all. And on November 10, I read in the crypto publication Protos that Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research, had received 31.7 billion Tethers in 2021. That meant that Bankman-Fried had supposedly sent $31.7 billion in real U.S. dollars to

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friends wanted something innocuous to avoid setting off alarms at banks, many of which still preferred not to do business with cryptocurrency traders. They picked Alameda Research. “Especially in 2017, if you named your company like We Do Cryptocurrency Bitcoin Arbitrage Multinational Stuff, no one’s going to give you a bank

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the other big players in DeFi was Sam Bankman-Fried. Stone could tell from watching Bankman-Fried’s crypto wallet addresses that his hedge fund, Alameda Research, was farming giant sums on tokens like SushiSwap. Stone estimated that Alameda earned billions of dollars this way. And Stone became an influential trader himself

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be ill-timed. On November 2, an article on crypto news site CoinDesk raised questions about Bankman-Fried’s finances, revealing that his hedge fund, Alameda Research, held nearly $6 billion of a cryptocurrency he’d created, called FTT, and owed billions of dollars to lenders. Though the article suggested Bankman-Fried

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his lawyers, even as investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice scrutinized whether he’d used customers’ funds to prop up his hedge fund Alameda Research, a crime that could send him to prison for years. (To me, it sure looked like he had.) “What I’m focusing on is what

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I arrived at Bankman-Fried’s penthouse, multiple news reports had emerged alleging that FTX had secretly lent billions of dollars of customer money to Alameda Research, which had lost it in some mix of bad bets, insane spending, and perhaps something even sketchier. John Ray III, the lawyer who was appointed

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2018 with Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, Gary Wang, and a small group of other friends from the effective-altruism community to run their hedge fund, Alameda Research. (The name itself was an early example of his casual attitude toward rules—it was chosen to avoid scrutiny from banks, which frequently closed its

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misplaced eight billion dollars?” I asked. “Mis-accounted,” Bankman-Fried said, sounding almost proud of his explanation. Sometimes, he said, customers would wire money to Alameda Research instead of sending it directly to FTX. (Some banks were more willing to work with the hedge fund than the exchange, for some reason.) He

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-Fried’s family dinners in Palo Alto. The other witness told prosecutors Bankman-Fried had ordered changes to the exchange’s computer code that allowed Alameda Research to borrow customer funds. The witness, who viewed this as inappropriate, said he’d raised the issue with Bankman-Fried, who’d responded that “it

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was actually being sent to his room. Singh and Wang were busy negotiating cooperation agreements with the government, as was Caroline Ellison, the head of Alameda Research. Each of them confessed at court hearings one by one, pleading guilty to fraud charges that carried potential decades-long prison sentences, though presumably they

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R S T U V W X Y Z A Adams, John, 70 affiliate marketing, 100 Aimin, Xu, 192 Akin Gump, 241–242 Akon, 27 Alameda Research bailout of Bitfinex by, 64 cryptocurrency owed by, 214 effective altruism movement and, 86, 223 founding of, 85–86 FTX loan to, 223, 226 Hong

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penthouse of Bankman-Fried in, 218–220 as pirates’ haven, 76 prison conditions in, 233–234 Baller Ape Club, 238 Bankman-Fried, Sam. See also Alameda Research; FTX appearance of, 3, 78 attempt to raise cash by, 215 authenticity of, 89 background of, 81–82, 83–84 Bahamas penthouse of, 218–220

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, 164 as cooperating witness against Bankman-Fried, 235 market strategy of, 225 move to Hong Kong by, 223 relationship with Bankman-Fried, 228 run on Alameda Research and, 226 El Salvador Bitcoin as official currency of, 199–201, 202–204 Bitcoin City plan, 201–202 El Zonte, 202–203 Mallers and, 26

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, 74–75, 99, 168 Fortune, 168 Founders Fund, 29 Fried, Barbara, 81–82 FTT, 214, 216 FTX ability to trade “on margin” on, 224, 232 Alameda Research as liquidity provider to, 224 Axie Infinity and, 124 Bankman-Fried on reason for failure of, 232, 233 bankruptcy declaration by, 216, 218 Binance and

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Bored Apes and, 154–155 Devasini’s refusal to make loan to, 231 endorsements of, 89–90 founding of, 87 headquarters of, 23 loan to Alameda Research, 223, 226 “mis-accounting” of funds, 228 naming rights for Miami Heat’s NBA arena, 15, 23, 89 “pig butchering” and, 231 professional video-gaming

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farmers,” 34 Goldman Sachs and IGE, 34 “Gordon Goner,” 144, 156 Green, Seth, 146 Greenberg, Andy, 98 Grillo, Beppe, 44 H hedge funds. See also Alameda Research betting against Tether, 70 Platinum Partners, 72 as short sellers, 70, 72 as Tether users, 26–27 Held, Dan, 21 Herbert, Stacy, 204–205, 210

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Singh, Nishad background of, 85 characteristics of, 93–94 as cooperating witness against Bankman-Fried, 234, 235 move to Hong Kong by, 223 run on Alameda Research and, 226 Sky Mavis, 123, 124, 126 “smart contracts,” 114 Smooth Love Potion as official cryptocurrency of Axie Infinity, 120 purpose of, 124 used as

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–156 Suarez, Francis, 15 SushiSwap, 110 Sutton, Willie, 101 Switzerland, 207 T Tan, Bilce, 183–185 TerraUSD, 162, 163, 165, 166, 226 Tesla, 22 Tether Alameda Research as customer of, 74, 95 banking system and, 52–54, 56, 57 Bankman-Fried on trustworthiness of, 95 Bitfinex and, 38 business model of, 58

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, 216 Wang, Gary background of, 85 characteristics of, 93 as cooperating witness against Bankman-Fried, 234, 235 move to Hong Kong by, 223 run on Alameda Research and, 226 Watters, Jesse, 216 Web3, 120, 132, 141–142 Weil, Joseph “Yellow Kid,” 177–178 Wells Fargo, 52 Whitehurst, Brian Bitfinex focused on by

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

intimidate two witnesses, including by leaking to the New York Times the personal writings of his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, who was the CEO of Alameda Research, his crypto hedge fund that also served as a vehicle for embezzling stolen FTX customer funds. It wasn’t his first offense: the prosecution also

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and reveling in his very public politicking. But then it all fell apart. On November 2, 2022, CoinDesk reported on a leaked balance sheet from Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund that doubled as a venture capital firm, buyer of Bahamian luxury real estate, and a general clearing house for

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, here, here, here, here AI (artificial intelligence) here, here, here, here, here and the 2024 election here Project Maven here and the Trump administration here Alameda Research here, here, here, here, here, here All-In (podcast) here, here, here, here Alpha Parties here Alphabet here Alsuwaidi, Ahmed here Alternative for Germany (AfD

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

on seven felony counts, finding that FTX had defrauded customers, lenders, and investors by “loaning” billions of dollars of customer deposits to its sister company, Alameda Research, to make risky, losing bets in the cryptocurrency market. I do not mean to suggest that one should be sympathetic toward SBF, but it’s

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’s also the case that SBF hacked the VC algorithm and catered to some of its worst biases. Tara Mac Aulay, an original cofounder of Alameda Research who quit the company (along with much of the rest of the team) in 2018 amid SBF’s “unethical and irresponsible approach to business,” told

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of Robin Hood on blockchain steroids. Bankman-Fried had worked briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism, but wound up starting a crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, instead. In the early days of crypto, it was so easy to make money that it would almost be unethical not to do it, SBF

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Lopatto, “Sam Bankman-Fried Was a Terrible Boyfriend,” The Verge, October 10, 2023, theverge.com/2023/10/10/23912036/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-caroline-ellison-alameda-research. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT transcript I obtained: I obtained it for a fee. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “thought 10 percent”: Caroline

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History

by Ben Mezrich  · 6 Nov 2023  · 279pp  · 85,453 words

young entrepreneurs of the past decade. After first making a name for himself at Jane Street Capital, then starting his own quantitative trading firm, called Alameda Research, at thirty, SBF had founded FTX, one of the fastest-growing crypto exchanges in the world. The stories about SBF were legendary, and unavoidable. How

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker  · 14 Jun 2025  · 381pp  · 119,533 words

he wanted to make. One of Sam’s EA connections in Japan set up an account there. Starting with $50,000, Sam’s new company, Alameda Research, started making trades, shuttling Bitcoin back and forth between the United States and Japan with a 10 percent return every day. Once he had proven

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-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, imploded in November 2022. He and his lieutenants at FTX used customers’ private account funds to cover trades made by Alameda Research, which Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) and his EA gang were still running as a hedge fund alongside the trading firm. When Alameda’s funds crashed

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quite make sense on the face of it. For example, Caroline Ellison, SBF’s ex-girlfriend, former colleague at Jane Street, and former CEO of Alameda Research, seemingly ran a strange Tumblr account. Media reports on the account, titled “worldoptimization,” collected extremely compelling evidence that Ellison was behind it (the author of

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It

by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris  · 10 Jul 2023  · 338pp  · 104,815 words

you.” But when FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, it was discovered that it had been sending customer deposits to a sister company called Alameda Research, which used them to fund its own trading and investment activities—that is, FTX was simply making promises and doing the opposite.21 Examples like

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao  · 19 May 2025  · 660pp  · 179,531 words

billionaire had entered the scene: Samuel Bankman-Fried, a rapidly rising star for his wild success cofounding the crypto exchange FTX and crypto trading firm Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he is known, credited EA for his origin story. A physics major at MIT, he said he had wanted to

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–9, 314–15 thresholds, 301–2, 305–8, 310–11 AI Scientist, 183, 318–19, 325, 347, 375 “AI takeoff,” 232 “AI winter,” 97, 435n Alameda Research, 231 Algorithmic Justice League, 161 algorithms, 51–52, 56, 373–74 Algorithms of Oppression (Noble), 162 Alibaba, 15, 159 Alignment Manhattan Project, 315–18 Allen