Sam Bankman-Fried Suggested FTX Pissed Away $10 Billion Because He and His Weirdo Orgy Cult Girlfriend Were Having Relationship Drama

By now you're no doubt aware that justice has been served in the fraud case involving FTX Financial. And that according to the sentencing guidelines and actuarial tables, there's a fair chance Sam Bankman-Fried will die in prison:

But we've barely scratched the surface of what there is to be learned about this case. When you're talking about $10 billion just disappearing like a fart in the wind, there's a lot to know. With that kind of money and these sorts of peculiar, eccentric, major players involved, it's become the sort of high stakes intrigue that will fuel dozens of true crime podcasts and documentary series. 

And there's no major character in this narrative than the woman SBF shared an intimate relationship with, along with a couple of dozen other socially awkward creeps in their polyamorous cult in the Bahamas. Yet for all the attention Caroline Ellison has received on her personal journey from Love Interest of the Defendant to Star Witness for the Prosecution, there are still things we're learning. For instance, long before she was squandering people's generational wealth, she was promoting Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on PBS's Arthur:

And how her unconventional upbringing might have led to some of her … oh, let's call them less mainstream sociopolitical opinions:

Source -The daughter of esteemed economists — her father, Glenn Ellison, is currently the head of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her mother, Sara Fischer Ellison, is an economics department lecturer at the university — she grew up outside of Boston, in a household filled with numbers. While other kids were playing with Lego, Ellison was learning about Bayesian statistics before middle school; one year, rather than write her father a birthday card, she presented him with an economic study of stuffed animal prices at Toys ‘R’ Us. “We definitely got exposed to a lot of economics,” Ellison previously told Forbes in an interview.

A natural mathematician, high school was a laboratory for Ellison’s love of numbers and she competed multiple times in the Math Prize for Girls, the national contest that draws the country’s brightest young minds. But her interests went far beyond math, and as a senior, she received an honorable mention in a linguistics olympiad. She also loved books—her parents read her the first Harry Potter book when she was 3, she said, then she read the second one on her own at age 5. (She has apparently described herself as a Ravenclaw.)

By the time Ellison arrived at Stanford as a math major in 2012, her professional ambitions were taking shape, and while adjusting to college life, she took to Tumblr to publish her daily musings. The now-deleted blog, called WorldOptimization, is unsigned but a close associate confirmed that it was hers. In it, she wrote that "the sexual revolution was a mistake" and that she believed “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers." She also mused about race science, in one post saying the "genetic differences there are massive" when it comes to Indian people from different provinces and castes — which has become a source of discrimination in Silicon Valley. And at the top of her list of “~cute boy things~” was “controlling most major world governments.”

I don't know. All that talk about conforming to rigid gender roles, genetic differences, and controlling the world sounds sort of Slytherin to me. But what I don't know about Ravenclaw could fill the library at the Ministry of Magic. Still, you can see how being raised by experts in economics and being an accomplished mathlete as a schoolkid might lead to an appreciation for polyamory as an adult. Because you'd have an advanced understanding of the complex matrices and binomial equations you'd need to in order to sort out that web of relationships in a logical way. 

Which brings us at last to the one relationship that matters most in all this. The one between SBF and Ellison. Because it appears likely that this is what caused all those family fortunes to disappear like Thanos snapped them out of existence:

Source - Ellison said in court that she and Bankman-Fried first slept together in the fall of 2018 and then dated from summer 2020 to summer 2021 and that she dumped him because he was 'distant' and not 'paying attention to her.'  …

In an unpublished 250-page memo, Bankman- Fried blamed Ellison for the fraud, aiming she was ill equipped for the role he gave her, and she refused to implement his trading strategies that would have prevented the collapse.

He wrote: 'She continually avoided talking about risk management — dodging my suggestions — until it was too late… Every time that I reached out with suggestions, it just made her feel worse. I'm sure that being exes didn't help.'

According to the memo, the couple's relationship ended 'the same way most of my relationships end - They want more intimacy and commitment and public visibility than I do, and I feel claustrophobic.'

Bankman-Fried argued Alameda would have stayed solvent if Ellison had agreed to hedge its aggressive trading strategy, as he claims he suggested.

'If Alameda had hedged, it would have remained solvent and prevented the entire unhappy story,' he wrote.

Bankman-Fried's conviction is just hours old. And cryptocurrency has only been around a few years. But this part of the story? It's a tale as old as time. 

Finally, some aspect to all of this that the average person can relate to. That the vast majority of us can wrap our non-financial brains around. You don't need to comprehend exchange rates in world markets or be able to calculate compounded interest rates in your head to understand this. Because ultimately it was all an affair of the heart. 

This wasn't some cold, calculating, diabolical plot. It wasn't gross negligence. There was no intent at malfeasance. It was just love between two crazy, star-crossed kids. Which is paradoxically way more complicated that cryptocurrency, and far easier to grasp. 

Who among us hasn't experienced this same dynamic? Caroline wanted emotional intimacy. Sam wanted space. She wanted to feel that spiritual connection and have him be present. He wanted remain independent. They tried to keep it professional, but they couldn't. There was just too much history. They'd already connected too deep. There was no disengaging the heart. And as is so often the case, the brain couldn't override it. 

In a way, it's profoundly beautiful. All those people who won't be able to set money aside for their children and grandchildren's financial security can now at least know that it's not because of any ill intent. It's because Caroline loved Sam too much. He left a hole in her heart that couldn't be filled, not even by all the other people in their orgy group combined. 

I say we ditch all the true crime podcasts and documentaries. And just get their story right where it belongs: On the Hallmark Channel. Here's hoping they can still find a way to make it work. They deserve their Happily Ever After.