Uncover the Untold Story of Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison

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, Original author: David Jeans & Sarah Emerson & Richard Nieva & Michael del Castillo, compiled by Odaily translator Katie Ku.In addition to SBF, FTX, one of the core figures behind it, the co-CEO Caroline Ellison who controls Alameda has always maintained a sense of mystery.(Just today, a spokesperson for FTX said that FTX had fired Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison, and Nishad Singh.)

Caroline Ellison is an adventurous math genius and Harry Potter fan. She's also a major player in the FTX debacle, the new darling of the alt-right.

In 2021, Caroline Ellison was asked if she had any advice for her younger self. Her answer was sincere and short: "I would tell me at the time, don't be so risk-averse and believe in yourself more." This is her previously undisclosed Comments in the Forbes 30 Under 30 application column.

A year later, those words were read as the epitaph of one of the biggest financial disasters of recent times, one that Caroline herself helped lead. Alameda, run by Caroline, is one of the cores of FTX's business landscape.It was Alameda who allegedly used FTX customer deposits to make speculative investments, withdrawing billions of dollars without users' knowledge. It was also Alameda who covered up the conspiracy, as the hedge fund ensured that its assets traded on FTX bypassed its own balance sheet. In a bankruptcy filing, FTX estimates that more than 1 million creditors will seek compensation.

There is very little public information about Caroline, but from conversations with eight people who knew her, as well as an unpublished interview with Forbes last October, we've pieced together a profile of the quiet math nerd who worked on crypto The field kept climbing until FTX went bankrupt. Over the course of a few years, Caroline devoted herself to the financial orgies of SBF's "Luxury Money" that plunged her into an ever-expanding vortex of bullshit, deceit, and desperation. She did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

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"There are a lot of people who are very smart, but not necessarily good at the messy world of trading - especially cryptocurrencies." - Caroline Ellison, May 2022

Caroline Ellison was a "star student". Mathematics professor Ruth Ackerman, who taught Caroline at Stanford 10 years ago, called her "smart, focused and very mathematically gifted." She can't believe that Caroline has been involved in one of the biggest frauds of the past decade.

"I got the news because people started reaching out to me on LinkedIn to revoke my endorsement of her computer scientist skills," Ackerman told Forbes.

“It’s really important to be comfortable with risk,” she said on a podcast in May. “There are a lot of people who are very smart, but not necessarily good at the messy world of trading, especially in crypto.”

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“Their goal was to maximize wealth. They never lived in a world where they didn’t take risks.” – An early Alameda employee

When Caroline Ellison was working at quantitative trading firm Jane Street in March 2018, a former colleague of hers approached her with a life-changing proposition.

While drinking coffee in California, SBF recommended to her to join Alameda Research, a new digital currency hedge fund he is in charge of, which will use the price difference of Bitcoin in different countries to arbitrage. SBF said it was a perfect arbitrage. The deal will help him achieve his goal of making money and donating billions of dollars to charity.

Caroline told Forbes in an unpublished interview in October 2021: "I thought it sounded exciting at the time, but I really liked Jane Street and it was a tough decision to leave."

But Caroline has stepped out of her comfort zone and officially into the cryptocurrency space.

Both Alameda and FTX are at the helm of SBF, who founded FTX after spending two years at Alameda, building what he considers a modern cryptocurrency exchange. When SBF decided to leave Alameda to focus on the fast-growing FTX, Caroline took over as the co-CEO of Alameda.FTX's dramatic implosion, from "property well" to bankruptcy within four days, turned attention to Alameda's $10 billion in assets and the company's alleged use of FTX's customer deposits to invest in risky speculation. Several cryptocurrency companies that were once regarded as the backbone of the industry are now facing the same fate. Despite the daily headlines accusing him of years of misconduct, the spotlight has expanded from the SBF to his inner circle, and Caroline has come into the public eye,

She is a rare female leader in a male-dominated industry.In recent days, Caroline has come under fire from cryptocurrency supporters who blame her for Alameda's downfall. But amid the scathing criticism, a group of people who defended her also emerged. A supporter of Caroline told Forbes that many in Caroline's defense have gathered on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by computer scientist Curtis Yarvin.Trabucco did not respond to a request for comment.

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"It's like we don't really know what we're doing." - When Caroline Ellison joins AlamedaCaroline's father, Glenn Ellison, is currently the chair of the MIT Economics Department, and her mother, Sara Fischer Ellison, is a lecturer in the school's economics department. She grew up in a digitally-heavy household outside Boston. While other kids were playing with Legos, Caroline started learning Bayesian statistics before middle school. One year, instead of writing a birthday card to her father, she sent him aEconomic Research Report on Prices of Plush Toys

. Caroline said in an interview with "Forbes" before: "I did come into contact with a lot of economics knowledge earlier than others."Caroline is a born mathematician and has participated in numerous Women in Mathematics Prize competitions. But her interest is far more than mathematics. In her senior year, she also gotExcellence Award in the Linguistics Olympiad

. She also loves to read, saying her parents read her the first Harry Potter book when she was 3 years old, and then read the second book herself when she was 5 years old. She claims to be a student of Ravenclaw House, which represents intelligence and intelligence.

When Caroline arrived at Stanford in 2012 as a mathematics major, her career aspirations were already taking shape. While adjusting to college life, she posts daily thoughts on Tumblr.

Last year, when Forbes asked her what she didn't learn in school that helped her in the real world, she replied: "Almost everything. Like taxes."She did learn one thing - aeffective altruism

philosophy. Popular in Silicon Valley, the movement calls for people to use data to maximize their efforts and positively impact the world. It was started by a group of philosophers, among them Will MacAskill. SBF said he convinced himself to use the money he earned to do good, and later joined the philanthropic arm of the FTX Future Foundation, which he resigned last week. At Stanford, Caroline joined the Effective Altruism Club on campus and became its vice president.Now people are starting to wonder if Caroline, the SBF, and their crew really believe in the principles of effective altruism, or if it was an effective way to cover up their alleged misconduct. existIn , a reporter asked SBF if his remarks about ethics were "mostly a front," and the SBF admitted. At one point, Caroline seemed to have renamed her blog The Fake Charity Nerdy, perhaps out of an ironic self-awareness.

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“It’s good for us to have two people who can take ultimate responsibility for things.” – Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of Alamedia with Sam Trabucco

After graduating from Stanford, Caroline became a trader on Jane Street, where she met SBF. They met because of their mutual interest in effective altruism.After SBF convinced her to jump ship to Alameda in 2018, Caroline realized she had landed at a start-up in disarray. "We really didn't know what we were doing," Caroline told Forbes.

There, she also met SBF close friends Nishad Singh, Gary Wang, and soon after, Sam Trabucco. They will all serve in administrative roles with SBF. They also share a common interest in effective altruism.

At the end of 2018, SBF moved its corporate headquarters from Berkeley, California to Hong Kong. According to an early employee, SBF believes that the city’s favorable regulatory environment, as well as the presence of companies such as Binance and Crypto.com, mean that Hong Kong is an obvious choice for Alameda. Over the next few months, the team shuttled between six WeWork shared offices across the city, including one dedicated to storing couches.

Not long after, Caroline and Trabucco were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. "It's good that we have two people who can take ultimate responsibility for things," she said in an interview at the time.

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"I guess I've been pretty lucky in a way." - Caroline Ellison, May 2022There have been mixed opinions about the relationship between Caroline and SBF over the past two weeks, but SBF confirmed it in an interview with The New York Times, sayingThe two have nothing to do

. A CoinDesk report said that Caroline had dated SBF several times and that the two had been roommates and were somewhat close, though the circumstances are unclear.

A few years ago, Caroline wrote on Tumblr with uncertain seriousness: "After exploring open relationships, she believes that everyone should have a ranking of their partners, and people should know that they are in the ranking position, higher positions should have vicious power struggles."As ambiguous as the relationship between executives,The relationship between Alameda and FTX was also murky, quickly overshadowing its sister company, FTX.SBF courted investors Sequoia Capital, NEA, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and FTX client deposits soared, surpassing 1 million users.

But even investors are sometimes in the dark about Alameda's role.As Alameda faded into obscurity, according to staff at FTX and companies that do business with the exchange and Alameda,Caroline becomes almost invisible

. The co-CEO of a project that received funding from Alameda told Forbes: “Despite having an investment relationship with the trading firm, they never interacted with her. And, for the most part, Caroline seemed happy to stay behind the scenes.

Caroline found herself with only control over Alameda when Trabucco stepped down as co-CEO in April, according to a former Alameda employee, and Trabucco left just months after publicly announcing his departure in August. on twitter. Trabucco said the role of co-CEO is "exhausting" and that he has been "not working at all" lately. The former Sasquehana trader, who graduated from MIT a year after SBF, said he had "significantly reduced" his role over the past few months and is leaving.

After a few months, everything started to fall apart. Last week, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that Binance would acquire FTX to rescue it from the liquidity crisis. But Binance quickly withdrew from the deal after due diligence, citing “mishandling of customer funds and alleged investigation by U.S. agencies.” In just a few days, SBF's empire faced collapse, with several of his entities filing for bankruptcy, including Alameda.

Currently, the US SEC and Department of Justice, as well as local authorities in the Bahamas, are investigating the situation. Regarding how Alameda lost all of its client funds, FTX allegedly moved to shore up the struggling firm. SBF's luxury penthouse in the Bahamas is reportedly up for sale for $40 million. Caroline, who was the central figure behind SBF, is now living with infamy.。Rumors circulated online that Caroline was planning to flee from Hong Kong to Dubai, which has no extradition treaty with the US, but her whereabouts are currently unknown

Her last public statement was a pair of tweets on Nov. 6, defending criticism of the company's balance sheet.

In an interview with crypto podcast El Momento 6 months ago, Caroline was asked if she could "make any changes" if she could go back in time. At the time, the so-called crypto winter had begun to have a chilling effect on many companies and markets, but FTX remained solvent.