Caroline Ellison wanted to step down but feared a bank run on FTX

Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison recognized she wasn’t doing a good job months before the company filed for bankruptcy, but Sam Bankman-Fried persuaded her to stay.

Caroline Ellison wasn’t doing a good job leading Alameda Research in 2022, and she did not hide it. Excerpts from her personal notes shared as evidence by prosecutors in Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial revealed details about the trading firm’s struggles and its CEO’s desire to resign weeks and months before FTX collapsed.

Ellison spent over 10 hours testifying during Bankman-Fried’s trial this past week, notably entering through the front doors of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, joined by her attorneys. Ellison said she had not seen Bankman-Fried since the crypto empire failed in November 2022, but their communication had eroded months before.

In April 2022, their romantic relationship ended, and Caroline started avoiding meetings with Bankman-Fried even though they still lived in the same luxurious apartment in the Bahamas. Alameda’s growing liabilities with FTX and the breakup with Bankman-Fried made her consider leaving the company altogether.

“I feel like neither [Sam] Trabucco nor I have been doing a great job of pushing on stuff,” she wrote in the document to Bankman-Fried, which was shared as evidence during her cross-examination by the former FTX CEO’s defense counsel.

Bankman-Fried asked her to stay on, saying that her departure could create rumors about Alameda’s financial health, thus harming FTX’s credibility, so Ellison remained CEO.

Ellison joined Alameda as a trader in 2018. By 2020, she handled most of the company’s operations, while Bankman-Fried focused on his newly launched crypto exchange, FTX. In August 2021, she became co-CEO alongside Sam Trabucco, who stepped down a few months later, leaving her in charge of the company. In August 2022, Trabucco officially resigned as co-CEO.

Ellison was against creating FTX, she revealed. “I didn’t think of myself as ambitious before I started at Alameda, but I believe I became more ambitious” under Bankman-Fried’s incentive, she said.

As CEO, Ellison was in charge of handling Alameda’s crypto lenders. In mid-2022, after the Terra ecosystem failed, the company’s open-term loans stood at $1.3 billion. The market downturn drained liquidity from crypto assets, prompting Alameda’s lenders to demand loan repayments.

According to Ellison, Bankman-Fried instructed her to keep repaying creditors via Alameda’s line of credit with FTX. In other words, Alameda would use FTX’s customer assets to repay crypto lenders. At the time, its line of credit with the exchange stood at $13 billion.

As lenders demanded loan repayments and Alameda’s balance sheets, Bankman-Fried suggested Ellison use “alternative means” for presenting the company’s financials. In the following months, Ellison would create many additional versions of a balance sheet to deceive creditors.

Early in November 2022, an alternative version of Alameda’s balance sheet was leaked. Ellison was on vacation in Japan at the time, but she had to travel to FTX Hong Kong’s office to deal with the company’s crisis.

While the balance sheet data didn’t reflect the company’s reality, it was enough to spread rumors and trigger a bank run on FTX a few days later, exposing an $8 billion gap between the companies.

Having cooperated with the U.S. Department of Justice since December 2022, Ellison will soon receive her sentence regarding the seven counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud she was charged with.