JANE ROSENBERG
- Caroline Ellison gave details on her past relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried in court on Tuesday.
- The ex-Alameda Research CEO said she "wanted more" in the relationship.
- Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud charges last year and is a star witness in the criminal case against Bankman-Fried.
It's not every day you get to testify against your ex, much less tell a federal court what went wrong in your relationship.
Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, broke down her relationship with her on-and-off boyfriend Sam Bankman-Fried during his criminal trial in a downtown Manhattan federal courtroom on Tuesday.
"In our personal relationship, there was a feeling that I wanted more in our relationship," Ellison testified. "But I felt like he was distant or not paying enough attention to me."
Ellison spilled the tea in front of jurors, the judge, lawyers, and more than 100 journalists and onlookers in the courtroom and two overflow rooms in the Manhattan courthouse.
She said the two began a romantic relationship in the fall of 2019. They had met a few years prior when she was an intern at Jane Street and Bankman-Fried was a trader. Bankman-Fried convinced her to join his own hedge fund, Alameda Research, as a trader in 2017 and she became co-CEO of the company in 2021 and the sole CEO in 2022, ahead of its collapse.
"We started sleeping together on and off," Ellison said, telling the courtroom that the pair began formally dating in 2020. They tried to keep the relationship private from their coworkers at FTX and Alameda, but word got around, Ellison said.
"The whole time we were dating, he was also my boss, so that created some awkward situations," Ellison said.
The pair were in an on-and-off relationship until the spring of 2022, when Ellison said it ended for good.
More details about Ellison's on-and-off romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried were revealed in a new biography of the FTX co-founder that hit the shelves on October 3. Author Michael Lewis wrote that Ellison was "terrified" of Bankman-Fried when she first met him and the FTX cofounder made her a pros and cons list for entering into a sexual relationship with him.
"Caroline wanted a conventional love with an unconventional man," Lewis wrote of the relationship. "Sam wanted to do whatever at any given moment offered the highest expected value, and his estimate of her expected value seemed to peak right before they had sex and plummet immediately after."
Since FTX's collapse, Bankman-Fried has attempted to pin blame for the company's issues on other executives, including Ellison. The FTX cofounder leaked entries from Ellison's private diary to The New York Times in July. The leaked diary entries also included details about Ellison's romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried, as well as admissions from the former Alameda Research CEO that she felt unqualified to lead the company.
On Tuesday, Ellison admitted she felt ill-prepared for the role.
"I felt like it was a big job and I wasn't particularly experienced," she told jurors, adding that Bankman-Fried had told her she could handle it and she was the only one for the job.
Despite her position, Ellison said she still had to run any major decisions by Bankman-Fried. She said she generally deferred to him, telling jurors that he owned the company, had the ability to fire her, and set her compensation. (Ellison said she received a $20 million bonus on top of a $200,000 salary in 2021.)
Bankman-Fried is being charged with orchestrating a scheme to defraud FTX customers and investors out of billions of dollars. Prosecutors allege the former FTX CEO commingled funds between FTX and Alameda Research.
Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud charges in December and has been cooperating with investigators since. The ex-Alameda Research CEO testified on Tuesday that she worked with Bankman-Fried and other members of his inner circle to defraud the customers and investors of FTX out of billions of dollars.
Bankman-Fried is on trial in Manhattan federal court on seven criminal charges of fraud. The trial kicked off last week and could take as long as six weeks.