Caroline Ellison said SBF considered raising money from Saudi crown prince to repay FTX customers
Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, exits court in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Caroline Ellison, who ran Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund while also dating the FTX founder, told jurors in her second day of testimony that one way her boss was considering repaying FTX customer accounts was by raising money from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Ellison, 28, pleaded guilty in December to multiple counts of fraud as part of a plea deal with the government and is now viewed as the prosecution’s star witness in Bankman-Fried’s trial. In damning testimony on Tuesday, she said Bankman-Fried directed her and other staffers to defraud FTX customers by funneling billions of dollars to sister hedge fund Alameda Research.
Assistant U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon wasted no time diving back into the questioning when court was called to session at 9:30am.
After previously detailing how FTX customer funds were used to repay Alameda loans, Ellison said on Wednesday that crypto lender Genesis called back a bunch of loans in 2022 and asked to see a balance sheet. Because Alameda’s actual balance sheet showed it had $15 billion in FTX customer funds, Bankman-Fried directed Ellison on June 28, 2022, to come up with “alternative” balance sheets that didn’t look as bad, she said.
Ellison, wearing a buttoned gray blazer with her long hair swept over her left shoulder, said she discussed her concerns with Bankman-Fried as well as top execs Gary Wang and Nishad Singh. She said the group brainstormed ways to make the balance sheet look better.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon questions Caroline Ellison as defense lawyer Mark Cohen stands to object at Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial before U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan over the collapse of FTX, the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, at Federal Court in New York City, U.S., October 11, 2023 in this courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
After the meeting, Ellison prepared a number of different balance sheet variations to send to Genesis. Eventually, according to Ellison, Bankman-Fried chose the one that omitted a line saying “FTX borrows,” hiding $10 billion in borrowed customer money. “Some was netted against related-party loans,” she said, and “some netted against crypto.”
That made it seem “like we had plenty of assets to cover our open term loans,” Ellison said.
Ellison told jurors she “was in a constant state of dread” since she knew there were billions of dollars of loans being recalled that could only be repaid with money from FTX customers. She said she was “worried about the possibility of customer withdrawals” that could happen at any time.
“I was concerned that if anyone found out, it would all come crashing down,” Ellison said. When asked by Sassoon why she continued with the scheme, Ellison said, “Sam told me to.”
By October 2022, the internal balance sheet had liabilities of $15.6 billion, while the numbers they showed the lender indicated just under $8 billion. Ellison said Bankman-Fried was talking about trying to raise money from Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, as a way to make FTX customers whole.
Disappearing Signal messages
Ellison, a Stanford graduate and one of Bankman-Fried’s earliest recruits to Alameda in 2017, was reportedly convinced by Bankman-Fried to ditch her job at Wall Street trading firm Jane Street to join Alameda as a trader. At the time, the hedge fund was still in its original office in the San Francisco Bay area.
Six years later, Ellison is testifying against the 31-year-old Bankman-Fried, who faces seven federal charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering, all tied to the collapse of FTX and Alameda late last year. If convicted in the trial that began last week, Bankman-Fried could spend his life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.
Ellison said Bankman-Fried directed FTX and Alameda employees to use the disappearing message setting on Signal and told them to be very careful about what they put in writing because of potential legal exposure. In addition to a companywide meeting about the Signal policy, Bankman-Fried also told employees that when it comes to Slack, they should only write things that they’re comfortable seeing on the front page of the New York Times.
Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, center, arrives at court in New York on Oct. 10, 2023.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Backing up to the summer and fall of 2022, Ellison provided more detail about her interactions with Bankman-Fried as his crypto firms’ financial problems were becoming more apparent. Ellison said the two ways they talked about bringing in more money for FTX were by acquiring BlockFi or by selling equity.
In August of last year, Ellison said Bankman-Fried told her that Alameda’s finances were her fault even though she’d been warning about FTX’s expanding portfolio of venture investments and the need to repay FTX customer accounts. Bankman-Fried told her she should have hedged and, “speaking loudly and strongly,” said it was “her fault.”
On the stand, Ellison took some blame, admitting she should have done things differently, “but Sam was the one who chose to make all the investments that put us in a leveraged position,” she said.
Ellison, who’d started dating Bankman-Fried in the summer of 2021, said that by the fall of 2022 they’d been broken up for several months. She said she would try to avoid one-on-one contact with Bankman-Fried, though they were still talking on Signal and were together in group meetings. She said she still provided him the same regular updates on Alameda and its balance sheet.
Ellison said she kept a Google Doc that had a subcategory labeled, “things Sam is freaking out about.” It included, “raising from MBS,” as well as “getting regulators to crack down on Binance,” a rival exchange that was also an early investor in FTX. Bankman-Fried wanted to see Binance feel some pain because he saw that as the best way for FTX to increase market share, Ellison said.
Another worry on the list was, “bad pr in the next six months,” which Bankman-Fried feared would interfere with FTX’s efforts to obtain a license for futures trading in the U.S.
WATCH: Ellison says “Sam directed me to commit these crimes”
Light uses artificial intelligence to automate companies’ finance and accounting functions.
Light
Danish startup Light is the latest in a series of European tech firms raising cash as venture capitalists search for the next big thing in artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2022, Light develops software that uses AI to automate various functions that exist within businesses’ finance teams, including accounting, bookkeeping and financial reporting.
The Copenhagen-headquartered company told CNBC that it had raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in fintech unicorns Revolut and GoCardless.
Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital also invested in the round, along with angel investors including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.
Light plans to use the cash to “double down on the commercial side” of the business, Jonathan Sanders, Light’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC. The startup recently opened an office in London and says it is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand.
Light isn’t the only startup out there using AI to streamline companies’ finance and accounting processes.
Pigment, a business planning and forecasting platform designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, last year raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. More recently, accounting software startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.
Currently, the market for software that helps companies manage their finances is dominated by industry behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, these systems can often be cumbersome, requiring specialists to “tinker around the edges for a year or two just to make it work,” according to Sanders.
“We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast,” Sanders told CNBC. Light’s customers include Lovable, the buzzy Swedish AI firm recently valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.
Sanders said AI can rapidly transform how companies handle their finances. “The future of numbers is text,” he says. For example, rather than sifting through company policies to find a team’s meal allowance, this can be automated by an AI agent that has access to the relevant documents.
Moving forward, Light wants to focus on large, enterprise-level customers that struggle with “broken processes and workflows,” according to Sanders. “No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence,” he told CNBC.
Technology
Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI will be in cash, and most will be used to lease Nvidia chips
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to media following a Q&A at the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Nvidia’s massive investment in OpenAI, announced earlier this week, will put billions of dollars into the coffers of the artificial intelligence startup to use as it sees fit. But most of the money will go towards use of Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips.
The agreement between the two companies was big on numbers but thin on specifics. They said the investment would reach up to $100 billion, paid out as AI supercomputing facilities open in the coming years, with the first one coming online in the second half of 2026.
The timing of the buildouts and the cost of each data center remains up in the air. However, what’s become clear is that OpenAI plans to pay for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) through lease arrangements, rather than upfront purchases, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not be named because the details are private.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who described this week’s deal as “monumental in size,” has estimated that an AI data center with a gigawatt of capacity costs roughly $50 billion, with $35 billion of that used to pay for Nvidia’s GPUs. By leasing the processors, OpenAI can spread its costs out over the useful life of the GPUs, which could be up to five years a person said, leaving Nvidia to bear more of the risk.
The Information previously reported on some aspects of the lease arrangement.
Nvidia agreed to invest over time as OpenAI’s data centers get up and running. The initial $10 billion will be available to OpenAI soon, and help the company work towards deploying its first gigawatt of capacity, a source told CNBC.
While Nvidia’s equity investment could help OpenAI with hiring, marketing and operations, the biggest single item it will be used for is compute, the people said. And that’s almost entirely directed at Nvidia’s GPUs, which are key to building and training large language models and for running AI workloads.
As a non-investment-grade startup that lacks positive cash flow, financing remains costly. OpenAI executives have called equity the most expensive way to fund data centers, and said that the company is preparing to take on debt to cover the remainder of the expansion.
In addition to offering a cost-efficient way for OpenAI to access chips, Nvidia’s lease option and long-term commitment can help the company land better terms from banks when it comes to raising debt, a person said.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.
‘They will get paid’
Speaking to CNBC in Abilene, Texas, home to the first new data center, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar pointed to the role Oracle and Nvidia are playing in the financing. Oracle, one of OpenAI’s partners on the Stargate project, is leasing the Abilene facility, and OpenAI will eventually pay for the operations.
“Folks like Oracle are putting their balance sheets to work to create these incredible data centers you see behind us,” Friar said. “In Nvidia’s case, they’re putting together some equity to get it jumpstarted, but importantly, they will get paid for all those chips as those chips get deployed.”
She said all the big partners are needed to help relieve a dramatic shortage of capacity.
“What I think we should all be focused on today is the fact that there’s not enough compute,” Friar said. “As the business grows, we will be more than capable of paying for what is in our future — more compute, more revenue.”
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Still, the OpenAI-Nvidia deal has raised some concerns about the sustainability of the AI boom.
Nvidia’s march to a $4.3 trillion market cap has been driven by GPU sales to OpenAI as well as to tech megacaps like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. OpenAI’s path to a $500 billion private market valuation has been enabled by hefty investments from Microsoft and others that allow the company to burn billions of dollars in cash while building its AI models that power services including ChatGPT.
Jamie Zakalik, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, said the Nvidia deal is the latest example of OpenAI raising money that it pours right back into the company providing the capital.
Investors are concerned about the “circular nature of this deal goosing up everyone’s earnings and everyone’s numbers,” said Zakalik. “But it’s not actually creating anything.”
Asked about those fears, Altman told CNBC the company is focused on driving real demand.
“We need to keep selling services to consumers and businesses — and building these great new products that people pay us a lot of money for,” he said. “As long as that keeps happening, that pays for a lot of these data centers, a lot of chips.”
— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report
WATCH: Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank unveil Stargate data center expansion
Instagram has installed a new privacy setting which will default all new and existing underage accounts to an automatic private mode.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Instagram now has 3 billion monthly active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on his Instagram account on Wednesday.
“What an incredible community we’ve built here,” Zuckerberg posted on his Instagram channel.
The figure is a major milestone for the photo-sharing app, which the social media company acquired in 2012 for $1 billion.
Meta last disclosed Instagram’s user figures in October 2022 when Zuckerberg said during an earnings call that the app had crossed 2 billion monthly users.
Meta said in April 2024 that it would no longer disclose the monthly and daily active user numbers for Facebook and its sibling apps on a quarterly basis. Since then, Meta has been reporting each quarter the number of daily active people using its family apps. That figure reached 3.48 billion, the company said in July, topping analysts’ estimates of 3.45 billion.
With 3 billion monthly users, Instagram joins the ranks of the Facebook and WhatsApp platforms.
Zuckerberg in January said that the Facebook app “is used by more than 3 billion monthly actives.” In April, Zuckerberg told analysts that WhatsApp had “more than 3 billion monthly actives.”
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