Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words
argument that Bankman-Fried had tried to 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
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to Chinese law enforcement officials to unfreeze more than a billion dollars’ worth of seized crypto—a clear violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Caroline Ellison testified to this fact in court. And Bankman-Fried had overseen a political-influence operation that implicated his colleagues, professional political operatives, an unnamed New
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of crypto industry pyrotechnics. The price of FTT began to plummet in anticipation of Zhao potentially dumping millions of tokens on the market. Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison cheekily offered on Twitter to buy all of Zhao’s FTT tokens for $22 each. FTX customers began withdrawing their funds—dollars and crypto—sparking
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everyone that I care about and everything I care about too,” said Bankman-Fried. He praised some of his former colleagues, including Gary Wang and Caroline Ellison, who had testified against him, and reminisced about what they had built together. “I threw all of that away,” he said. “It haunts me every
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words
would face a real-life version of this dilemma at his criminal trial in Manhattan. The testimony against him had been compelling, particularly that of Caroline Ellison, the former Alameda CEO and sometime SBF girlfriend. (Ellison pled guilty to fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges.) The government had lots of receipts, and
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’s conclusion: James Fanelli, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Moral Thinking,” The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2023, wsj.com/livecoverage/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-trial-caroline-ellison/card/sam-bankman-fried-s-moral-thinking-FbKBJQkdl83SlNEUWwiT. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT as “infinite ethics.”: Joe Carlsmith, “Infinite Ethics and the Utilitarian Dream
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-a-sentence-of-20-years. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Ellison pled guilty: MacKenzie Sigalos and Rohan Goswami, “FTX’s Gary Wang, Alameda’s Caroline Ellison Plead Guilty to Federal Charges, Cooperating with Prosecutors,” CNBC, December 2022, cnbc.com/2022/12/22/ftxs-gary-wang-alamedas
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-caroline-ellison-plead-guilty-to-federal-charges-cooperating-with-prosecutors.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT on conflict-of-interest grounds: Justin Wise, “Paul Weiss Drops
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SBF: Elizabeth 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
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percent”: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 10, 2023, U.S. District Court, Southern District, United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried, as prepared by Southern District Reporters, P
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.C., 698. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT additional $3 billion: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 10, 2023, 703. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT didn’t dispute the risks: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 10, 2023, 704–5. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT repay Alameda’s loans
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: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 11, 2023, U.S. District Court, Southern District, United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried, as
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prepared by Southern District Reporters, P.C., 765. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he frequently checked: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 11, 2023, 753. GO TO
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NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT substantial market downturn: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 10, 2023, 725. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT summer or fall 2021
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: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 10, 2023, 698. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT once between April and July: “Bitcoin USD (BTC-USD) Stock Historical
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-and-how-could-he-have-done-what-he-did-three-theories-and-a-lot-of-evidence. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “was a utilitarian”: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 11, 2023, 807. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT BTC crossed over: “Bitcoin USD (BTC-USD) Stock Historical Prices & Data,” Yahoo Finance. GO
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Is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) Really, and How Could He Have Done What He Did?” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT government’s incisive prosecutor: Caroline Ellison testimony, October 10, 2023, 694–95. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “enormously valuable existence”: Emphasis in original. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT St
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis · 2 Oct 2023 · 263pp · 92,618 words
were playing a brain game. Act II 5 How to Think About Bob It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at
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stuff is in a box,” she said. No one on the trading floor offered her so much as a hug. With her box of stuff, Caroline Ellison walked out onto the streets of lower Manhattan. Once there and on her own, her first thought was: God, I’ve made a huge mistake
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-head of Alameda he checked out,” said an Alameda employee. That left Sam’s private hedge fund in the hands of its other co-CEO, Caroline Ellison. When he’d named her to the job, Sam imagined Caroline managing the people, while Sam Trabucco managed the trading risks. “People really liked being
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took a new and keener 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
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. Sam had an almost weirdly low tolerance for physical pain and so passed on donating his kidney. Otherwise, Sam was all in on the sacrifice. Caroline Ellison wasn’t like that. She lacked confidence in herself. “She was borrowing her ego from Sam because she lacked one,” said George. “Sam gave her
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hired upon his arrival in Hong Kong, Constance Wang and Jen Chan. Most of those people, George 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
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struck people inside FTX as of no more than prurient interest.¶ Everyone noticed that one of its contributors was the current girlfriend 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
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going on around him. You ask him for a steak and he puts his head up the bull’s ass.” The bankruptcy team had located Caroline Ellison by phone on the Saturday after Ray became FTX’s new CEO. She at least had been able to explain where some of the wallets
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux · 11 Sep 2023 · 385pp · 106,848 words
manage the other programmers. A few months later, Bankman-Fried recruited another young mathlete whom he’d worked with at Jane Street. Her name was Caroline Ellison, and she was a soft-spoken redhead and a Harry Potter superfan. The daughter of MIT professors, she’d grown up in Newton, a suburb
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treatment or access to confidential information. But Bankman-Fried assured me, and others who asked, that Alameda played by the same rules as other traders. Caroline Ellison and another young trader had been appointed co-CEOs of Alameda, and Bankman-Fried told me he now worked solely on FTX. In September 2021
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see Gary Wang, the coder, at his desk. I heard he liked to arrive at work in the evening and work through the night. And Caroline Ellison was in Hong Kong, like usual, running the hedge fund Alameda. The only one I spotted was Nishad Singh, who’d taken the title of
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’d be annoyed by the poor quality of the business plans too. I had hoped to finally meet Gary Wang, FTX’s star coder, or Caroline Ellison, the former Jane Street colleague who was by then the head of Alameda. But I didn’t see them anywhere either. * * * — A DAY BEFORE Crypto
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in crypto. His supply of money was seemingly limitless. Celsius executives approached him about possibly buying their company. He met with them on June 12. Caroline Ellison, the head of his hedge fund Alameda, joined the call. The two of them had a lot of questions about Celsius’s balance sheet and
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end up overwhelming everything else.” To explain what happened, we had to go back to Hong Kong, where Bankman-Fried had moved in 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
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, and a favorite of Silicon Valley, Alameda faced more competition, and the easy trades disappeared. It shifted its strategy to, essentially, gambling on shitcoins. As Caroline Ellison, then Alameda’s co-CEO, explained in a March 2021 post on Twitter: “The way to really make money is figure out when the market
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might get grounded. But he 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
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Bankman-Fried on Arbitrage and Altruism,” Conversations with Tyler podcast, January 6, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The way to really make money”: Caroline Ellison, Twitter, March 7, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT buying Dogecoin because Elon Musk: Sam Trabucco, Twitter, April 22, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman · 17 Jul 2023 · 329pp · 99,504 words
close friends from MIT, including roommate Gary Wang, whom he had known since meeting him in high school math camp, and Jane Street colleagues like Caroline Ellison, with whom he had become close. They began operating out of a small space in Berkeley, not far from where Sam grew up. Eventually the
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FTX, was a high school 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
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day supplant Goldman Sachs. All 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
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high-frequency trading firms like Jump Trading. It needed a new way to make money, so it started placing riskier bets. The head of Alameda, Caroline Ellison, tweeted in March 2021 that instead of “wasting time trying to trade back and forth for a few points of edge . . . the way to really
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at the poker and blackjack tables, even quasi-bragging about his card-counting skills. He “may or may not be banned from 3 casinos.” Similarly, Caroline Ellison, the then co-CEO of Alameda, said in a podcast earlier in 2022 that “being comfortable with risk is very important.” She said she could
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. Sam, his parents, and senior FTX executives purchased nearly $121 million worth of real estate on the island nation. Poring over obscure podcast interviews and Caroline Ellison’s old Tumblr posts, citizen journalists looked for clues to the company’s collapse. In one post that recirculated, Ellison described the benefits of continually
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assured. On December 19, Gary Wang, cofounder of FTX, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities fraud, and securities fraud. Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda, admitted to the same crimes as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering. They agreed to cooperate in the DOJ’s
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
also picked up on stranger facets of SBF and his circle, things that didn’t 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
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a Little-Known Crypto Trader. Then FTX Collapsed,” New York Times, November 23, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/business/ftx-caroline-ellison-sbf.html. 69 Tarpley Hitt, “Are These Caroline Ellison’s Tumblrs?,” Gawker, November 14, 2022, archived March 28, 2023, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20230328082349/gawker
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.com/money/are-these-caroline-ellisons-tumblrs. 70 “worldoptimization,” archived November 11, 2022, accessed March 28, 2023, https://caroline.milkyeggs.com/worldoptimization. Formatting in the original. 71 Harry Potter and the
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by Parmy Olson · 284pp · 96,087 words
p(doom), but he cared enough about AI safety to invest $500 million in Anthropic. His FTX cofounders and fellow effective altruists, Nishad Singh and Caroline Ellison, also invested in the start-up that had split from OpenAI about a year earlier. In early 2022, MacAskill noticed a tweet from Musk, saying