Chelsea Jia Feng/Insider
- Caroline Ellison worried she'd made a huge mistake within weeks of starting at Alameda Research.
- She told Michael Lewis, Sam Bankman-Fried's biographer, that she was "terrified" of the CEO.
- Ellison and SBF maintained a professional and, at times, romantic relationship from 2015 to 2018.
Before Caroline Ellison warmed up to dating Sam Bankman-Fried, she was afraid of him.
"I was kind of, like, terrified of him," she told Michael Lewis, whose biography of Bankman-Fried, "Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon," came out this week.
Ellison was convinced by Bankman-Fried, a fellow effective altruist and Jane Street alum, to leave her unsatisfying job at the Wall Street firm to work at his crypto trading firm Alameda Research.
Just a couple of weeks into the new gig, Ellison called her mom, worried that she'd made the biggest mistake of her life, Lewis wrote.
Lewis described chaos at the company: SBF expected his employees to work 18-hour days and "give up anything like a normal life," Tara Mac Aulay, Alameda's cofounder, told Lewis.
"He would not show up for meetings, not shower for weeks, have a mess all around him with old food everywhere, and fall asleep at his desk," Mac Aulay told Lewis. "He did zero management and thought that if people had any questions, they should just ask him. Then in his one-on-ones with people, he'd play videogames."
Ellison has said in the past that she found Alameda a "super challenging environment" and that she spent a lot of time at work. She became co-CEO of the firm in 2021.
Lewis' book also revealed more details about her romantic relationship with the FTX cofounder.
In one instance, Bankman-Fried wrote her a memo that listed the pros and cons of having a sexual relationship with him in response to her own four-page letter about their confusing interactions.
"In a lot of ways I don't really have a soul," Bankman-Fried wrote in the memo, according to Lewis. "There's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy?"
Ellison told Lewis that SBF would say he felt conflicted about having sex with her, yet he would continue to do so before ignoring her for months.
Her work at Alameda Research catapulted her into scrutiny when her boss and onetime boyfriend's trading empire imploded. As a result, Ellison faced seven criminal charges to which she pleaded guilty in December 2022. She has not yet been sentenced.