Who is Caroline Ellison, a key witness testifying against Sam Bankman-Fried?
NEW YORK - In 2018, a bespectacled Stanford graduate named Caroline Ellison decided to leave her job on Wall Street to join a startup cryptocurrency hedge fund called Alameda Research because she thought she would earn more money to give to charitable causes.
Her firsthand account is expected to be crucial to efforts by Manhattan federal prosecutors to convict Bankman-Fried on fraud charges stemming from FTX's November 2022 implosion. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at Alameda. Bankman-Fried's defense lawyers have signaled that they plan to try to undercut Ellison's credibility and pin the blame for the collapses of FTX and Alameda on her. In his opening statement last week, defense lawyer Mark Cohen said Bankman-Fried had advised Ellison to hedge Alameda's bets against a downturn in cryptocurrency markets, but that she did not do so.
The daughter of two Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics scholars, Ellison was a high achiever, taking part in math competitions throughout high school and college and landing a job in New York as a quantitative trader with Jane Street after graduating from Stanford University, she said in a July 2020 FTX podcast.
She told the FTX podcast she decided to join Bankman-Fried at Alameda despite lacking experience with cryptocurrencies to"maximize my impact."Ellison indeed earned money, including $28.8 million in bonuses in addition to FTX stock options, FTX's current management said in a July lawsuit against her, Bankman-Fried, and other former executives. FTX said Bankman-Fried took more than $500 million in fraudulent loans from Alameda.
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