The Altruists True Story: What Really Happened With Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison

11 Nov

An empty luxury penthouse at night with a crumpled beanbag, a row of red-glowing monitors and papers scattered across the floor, overlooking a moonlit tropical marina. — FTX was run from the Bahamas until its collapse in November 2022.

They Set Out To Give Away Billions, Then $8 Billion Of Customers' Money Went Missing: The Real Story Behind The Altruists

Netflix's The Altruists arrives on Thursday 19 November 2026, and it asks a question that still divides people who followed the FTX collapse. How did two young people who said they wanted to make as much money as possible in order to give it away end up at the centre of a multibillion-dollar fraud that a jury, and then an appeals court, said was built on customers' money?

The eight-episode limited series stars Anthony Boyle as Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and Julia Garner as Caroline Ellison, his on-off girlfriend and the chief executive of his trading firm, Alameda Research. Netflix calls it "a toxic love story inspired by a real fraud".

The real story is stranger than most fiction, and it is also unusually well documented, thanks to a month-long criminal trial, a federal appeal and a bankruptcy that is still paying out. This guide sets out what really happened, what the courts decided, where Bankman-Fried and Ellison are now, and what the makers of the series have said about the parts they had to imagine.

The Series: Cast, Creators And Release Date

The Altruists is created by Graham Moore, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Imitation Game. He is writer and showrunner alongside Jacqueline Hoyt, whose credits include The Underground Railroad. Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions is among the producers, and Julia Garner is also an executive producer.

The series is inspired by the reporting of journalists Kevin T. Dugan and Jen Wieczner for New York Magazine, and Netflix says both consulted on it. All eight episodes are released at once on 19 November.

Alongside Boyle and Garner, the series regulars include Alex Lawther as Sam Trabucco, Karan Soni as Nishad Singh, Eugene Young as Gary Wang, Matt Rife as Ryan Salame, Madison Hu as Constance Wang and Naomi Okada as Claire Watanabe. Paul Reiser and Robin Weigert play Bankman-Fried's parents, the Stanford law professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, and Jennifer Grey plays Ellison's mother, Sarah Fisher Ellison. Hudson Williams, Terry Chen and Maddie Hasson are among the recurring cast.

Effective Altruism And The Road To Alameda

Both Bankman-Fried and Ellison worked at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street before Alameda. Both were drawn to effective altruism, a movement that argues people should use evidence and reason to do the most good they can. For some followers, that meant "earning to give": choosing a lucrative career in order to donate as much as possible.

Bankman-Fried founded Alameda Research in 2017 and Ellison joined it in 2018. FTX followed in 2019. According to the appeals court's summary of the trial evidence, FTX grew quickly: by 2022 its customers were trading around $10 to $15 billion a day. Bankman-Fried became one of the most visible figures in crypto, a regular in Washington and a major political donor.

Alameda's relationship with FTX is the heart of the case. Alameda was FTX's largest customer and main market maker, and FTX gave it a large line of credit, which allowed it to run negative balances on the exchange's books. That arrangement, the court later said, provided "substantial benefits to Alameda".

How It Fell Apart In Nine Days

In 2022, as interest rates rose and crypto prices fell, Alameda's net asset value dropped from more than $40 billion in late 2021 to about $10 billion by June 2022, according to the appeals court. Lenders began recalling loans.

On 2 November 2022, a crypto news site published a version of Alameda's balance sheet. It showed how heavily the firm relied on tokens linked to FTX itself. Customers rushed to withdraw their money, and within days the withdrawals became a run that FTX could not meet. Binance, the rival exchange run by Changpeng Zhao, announced it would sell its holdings of FTX's token, then briefly agreed to buy FTX before walking away.

On 11 November 2022, Bankman-Fried was replaced as chief executive and FTX filed for bankruptcy. In December 2022 he was arrested in the Bahamas, where FTX was based, and extradited to the United States. By the end of that month, Ellison and Gary Wang, FTX's co-founder and technology chief, had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

The Trial And Caroline Ellison's Testimony

Bankman-Fried's trial in Manhattan in October 2023 lasted four weeks. He faced seven counts: two of wire fraud and five of conspiracy, covering wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud and money laundering.

Much of the case against him came from his inner circle, testifying under cooperation agreements. Ellison was the most important witness. According to the appeals court's account of the evidence, she testified that Bankman-Fried directed her to use FTX customer funds to repay Alameda's lenders, and that he told her to send a lender a false balance sheet to make Alameda look healthier than it was. She also testified that customer money flowed through Alameda to fund political donations.

Bankman-Fried took the stand in his own defence. He admitted making mistakes in running FTX but denied stealing anyone's money. On 2 November 2023, exactly a year after the balance sheet leak, the jury found him guilty on all seven counts.

The Sentences

On 28 March 2024, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered him to forfeit about $11 billion. Prosecutors had said he stole $8 billion from FTX customers.

The cooperating witnesses were treated very differently. Ellison, who had pleaded guilty to seven charges including wire fraud and money laundering, was sentenced in September 2024 to two years in prison. Judge Kaplan said he had never seen a cooperator like her in his time on the bench, but decided that the seriousness of the crimes still required a prison term. She was also ordered to forfeit $11 billion.

Ryan Salame, who ran FTX's Bahamas-based unit, was sentenced to seven and a half years. Nishad Singh, FTX's director of engineering, and Gary Wang were each sentenced to time served with three years of supervised release, in October and November 2024 respectively. "I took the easy path, the cowardly path, instead of doing the right thing," Wang told the court.

Where Are Sam Bankman-Fried And Caroline Ellison Now?

Ellison began her sentence at a federal prison in Connecticut in November 2024. In October 2025 she was moved to community confinement, and on 21 January 2026 the Federal Bureau of Prisons released her after about 14 months in custody. She remains on supervised release and has agreed to a 10-year ban on serving as an officer or director of a company.

Bankman-Fried remains in a low-security federal prison in California. He has continued to fight his conviction on every available front.

In April 2026, a federal judge denied his motion for a new trial. On 12 June 2026, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously upheld his conviction, sentence and forfeiture. The government's evidence, Judge Barrington Parker wrote, was "conservatively stated, robust". The court rejected his central argument that he should have been allowed to show that FTX had enough assets to make customers whole, ruling that fraud occurs when a defendant uses lies to obtain someone's money, whether or not he intends to repay it.

On 10 September 2026, Bankman-Fried asked the US Supreme Court to hear his case. The government's deadline to respond has been extended to 16 December 2026, so no decision on whether the court will take the case is expected before then.

He has also formally applied for a presidential pardon; in June 2026 the Department of Justice listed the request as pending. In January 2026, Donald Trump said he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried, and the White House pointed to those remarks again when the application became public in June.

Did FTX Customers Get Their Money Back?

On paper, yes, and then some. FTX's bankruptcy estate has made five rounds of distributions. After the fifth, in July 2026, FTX said customer claims in its main classes had received 105 per cent of their allowed value, and small "convenience" claims 120 per cent.

There is an important catch. Those claims were valued in dollars at the time of the bankruptcy in November 2022, when crypto prices were far lower than they later became. Customers who held Bitcoin or other tokens on FTX received the 2022 dollar value of their holdings, not the coins themselves.

On appeal, Bankman-Fried's lawyers argued that FTX and Alameda, while temporarily short of cash, always held enough assets to make customers whole, and that later events proved it. The appeals court was clear that this was no defence. Customers were defrauded, it said, as soon as their money was moved to Alameda, "regardless of how strongly he believed he might later return the money".

What The Makers Say They Imagined

The series is not a documentary, and its makers have been open about where it goes beyond the record.

Graham Moore has said the story is built on research, first-hand accounts, the trial and the reporting of Dugan and Wieczner, and that "thousands and thousands of pages of trial transcripts" were part of the process. But he has also said the series deliberately focuses on moments that were never recorded. "Those moments between Sam and Caroline were not recorded or documented in any way," he said. "There isn't proof for exactly what happened, so it's required on our part to do some highly educated imagination."

The team set themselves a rule: "if a moment already existed on film somewhere, we weren't going to show it." That means some of the most famous public moments of the saga may be absent or only implied, while private conversations, arguments and the relationship itself are dramatised.

Moore has also acknowledged a problem with his sources. Many of the people the writers spoke to have been convicted of fraud or pleaded guilty. "I don't think we could consider any of them unbiased narrators of their own stories," he said.

The series is also structured around two timelines six years apart, moving between the idealistic early days and the investigation, rather than telling the story in strict order. And the performances are interpretations rather than impressions. Moore has said Boyle had "almost too much material" on Bankman-Fried, while Garner had the opposite problem: "there are only two pieces of audio of Caroline we could find".

What To Watch For When The Series Drops

Because The Altruists had not been released at the time of writing, these are not confirmed changes. They are the places where the real record is either firm or silent, and where the drama will have to choose.

The romance. The trial established that Bankman-Fried and Ellison had an on-off relationship, and Ellison spoke about it on the stand. But what they said to each other in private is, by Moore's own account, imagined. Treat intimate scenes as dramatisation.

Who was in charge. The jury accepted the prosecution's case that Bankman-Fried was the driving force, and Ellison testified that he directed her. But Ellison also pleaded guilty and ran Alameda. A series framed as a love story may distribute blame differently from the courtroom. Watch how much agency it gives her.

Effective altruism. Moore has said he believes both "got into this to make the world a better place". That is his interpretation. Whether their motives were sincere throughout is one of the most disputed questions in the case, and the courts did not need to answer it.

"Everyone got their money back." If the series ends by suggesting the fraud was victimless because customers were repaid, remember the appeals court's reasoning and the 2022 valuation of claims.

The supporting cast. Several characters are real people with their own legal outcomes: Wang and Singh avoided prison, Salame received seven and a half years. Any scene that changes what they knew or did should be weighed against their testimony and pleas.

Binance and CZ. Changpeng Zhao appears as a character. In real life, Binance's token sale helped trigger the run on FTX. Zhao later pleaded guilty in an unrelated US case over Binance's anti-money-laundering failures and was pardoned by Trump in October 2025. Watch whether the drama compresses that rivalry.

The Documentary Version

Viewers who want Bankman-Fried's own account will soon have it. Prime Video's three-part documentary series The Boy Who Stole Billions?, directed by Nanette Burstein, premieres on 30 November 2026. Amazon says it features Bankman-Fried telling his story from prison, alongside interviews with people who built FTX with him, and asks whether it was "fraud, or did his risky bets simply spiral out of control?" The courts have already answered that question; the documentary will show how he answers it himself.

The Netflix drama and the Prime documentary arrive 11 days apart. Between them, they will shape how a new audience remembers FTX. The record is clear on the essentials: customer money was taken, a jury convicted, an appeals court agreed, and the people closest to Bankman-Fried testified against him. What happened between two people in a Bahamas penthouse is the part nobody can prove, and it is exactly the part The Altruists has chosen to imagine. For another founder whose story became a screen drama, read our guide to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

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James Taylor