![]() Multiple crypto companies once seen as industry pillars are now on the verge of the same fate. When Bankman-Fried decided to step away from Alameda to focus full-time on the fast-growing FTX, Ellison, a quiet and quirky child of MIT economics professors, took over as co-CEO.Īs FTX cartoonishly imploded, going from “Assets are fine” tweets to bankruptcy in four days, attention turned to Alameda’s $10 billion in assets and its alleged practice of funneling FTX’s customer deposits to invest in risky speculative bets. Behind both Alameda and FTX was Bankman-Fried, a bloviating then-billionaire founder, who had founded the FTX two years after Alameda to build what he considered a modern cryptocurrency exchange. “It was a really hard decision to leave."īut Ellison did leave, abandoning her cushy job for a gig at a crypto Icarus that came crashing down in spectacular fashion last week. I mean, I really love Jane Street,” Ellison told Forbes in a previously unpublished interview in October 2021. "I was like, wow, that sounds pretty exciting. ![]() The exchange would help him toward his goal of " earning to give" billions to charity. Over coffee in California, Sam Bankman-Fried, a disarmingly aloof crypto entrepreneur, pitched her about joining Alameda Research, a new digital currency hedge fund he was working on that would exploit the differences in pricing for Bitcoin in different countries. In March 2018, Caroline Ellison was working at the quant-trading firm Jane Street when one of her former colleagues approached her with a proposition that would change her life. “They never lived in a world where they weren't risking a lot.” “Their whole goal was to maximize wealth,” an early Alameda employee said. “There are a lot of people who are very smart, but aren’t good, necessarily, at the messy world of trading-especially crypto.” “Being comfortable with risk is very important,” Ellison said on a podcast in May. agencies - including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice - have announced investigations, Ellison seems headed towards a nadir that belies her pedigree and the experiences of people who knew her in a past life, a risk taken and gone catastrophically bad. Now, as the life-savings obliterating carnage of FTX’s collapse comes into clearer focus, and multiple U.S. “The first I heard of the current controversy was when people started contacting me on LinkedIn, telling me to withdraw my endorsement of her skill as a computer scientist,” Starkman told Forbes. ![]() Ruth Starkman, a math professor who taught Ellison at Stanford 10 years ago, called her former student “bright, focused, very mathy” - a challenge, she said, to reconcile with Ellison becoming wrapped up in one of the largest alleged frauds of the past decade. She was a writer of live action role playing scenes. “There are a lot of people who are very smart, but aren’t good, necessarily, at the messy world of trading-especially crypto.”īefore she found herself at the center of crypto’s most massive meltdown, Caroline Ellison was a star student. She did not respond to multiple comment requests for this story. Over the course of a few years, Ellison’s wholehearted embrace of Bankman-Fried’s “new jazz” financial hijinks pitched her into an ever-widening crypto gyre of bullshit, deceit and desperation. There is little publicly available information about Ellison, but conversations with eight people who knew her, and a previously unpublished interview she gave to Forbes last October, paint a rough picture of a quiet math nerd who climbed the crypto hierarchy until it all went bust. Illustration by Gracelynn Wan for Forbes Photo by Guerin Blask for Forbes Read Forbes’ complete coverage of the catastrophic collapse that shook crypto VIEW ARTICLES
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