The Caroline Testimony

November 11, 2022, 4:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. FTX Trading Limited, the cryptocurrency exchange Sam Bankman-Fried had founded in May 2019 and grown to a $32 billion valuation by January 2022, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the District of Delaware. Hours later, the new chief executive John Ray III — who had supervised the wind-down of Enron — files a declaration describing FTX as "a complete failure of corporate controls" exceeding any he had seen in forty years. Bankman-Fried is convicted on November 2, 2023, on seven federal counts and sentenced on March 28, 2024 to twenty-five years in federal prison.

Sterling Aldridge's biography opens earlier — in Palo Alto, where Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried was born in 1992, the son of two Stanford Law School professors — and follows the arc through the MIT physics undergraduate years, the Jane Street Capital trading and the long effective-altruism education under William MacAskill, the 2017 Alameda Research founding and the Korean kimchi-premium arbitrage that produced its first profits, the May 2019 founding of FTX in Hong Kong, the December 2021 Super Bowl ad and the Larry David Super Bowl ad, the long Caroline Ellison Alameda CEO years, the Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen and Stephen Curry celebrity endorsements, the November 2022 CoinDesk leak and the Binance term-sheet, the FTX Bahamas Bahamian-prison year, the extradition to the United States, the trial in the Southern District of New York under Judge Lewis Kaplan, the Caroline Ellison cooperating-witness testimony, and the March 2024 sentencing.

What emerges is a portrait of the MIT-trained Jane Street trader whose effective-altruism conversion produced one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history — and the trial that the federal government built in eleven months.