How Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and early recruit helped put the FTX founder behind bars for 25 years
Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, center, arrives at court in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In sentencing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to a 25-year prison sentence on Thursday, Judge Lewis Kaplan cited testimony from Caroline Ellison, an ex-girlfriend of the defendant and early recruit into his crypto enterprise.
“I keep coming back to Ms. Ellison’s testimony that he knew it was wrong,” Kaplan said at the sentencing hearing in downtown Manhattan. “He knew it was criminal.”
Ellison was the star witness for the Department of Justice in its prosecution of Bankman-Fried. She agreed to a plea deal in December 2022, a month after FTX spiraled into bankruptcy.
As part of her testimony at the criminal trial late last year, Ellison supplied the government and the jury with text messages, documents and secret recordings that ultimately helped lead to Bankman-Fried’s conviction on all seven charges against him.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement after the sentencing on Thursday that Bankman-Fried’s “deliberate and ongoing lies demonstrated a brazen disregard for his customers’ expectations and disrespect for the rule of law, all so that he could secretly use his customers’ money to expand his own power and influence.”
Ellison, who ran FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research, pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Though Ellison faces similar sentencing guidelines to Bankman-Fried, she’s expected to receive a far more lenient sentence due to her role as a cooperating witness.
Caroline Ellison is questioned as Sam Bankman-Fried watches during his 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, October 11, 2023 in this courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Ellison’s complicated ties to SBF
Ellison jumped into Bankman-Fried’s crypto orbit in 2017.
She’d been working as a trader at Jane Street, where Bankman-Fried got his start in finance. Bankman-Fried had reportedly convinced the Stanford graduate to ditch her Wall Street gig and join Alameda, when the hedge fund was still in its original Bay Area office.
Ellison spent years as Bankman-Fried’s on-again, off-again girlfriend and, at times, his roommate. She followed Bankman-Fried from California to Hong Kong and ultimately to the Bahamas, as Bankman-Fried repeatedly shifted headquarters for his crypto companies.
Michael Lewis wrote about Ellison in his book, “Going Infinite,” which covered Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall. In 2021, Ellison was promoted to CEO of Alameda, a job for which, according to Lewis’s reporting, neither Ellison nor Bankman-Fried found her particularly well suited.
“Caroline sensed that, even as Sam promoted her to CEO of Alameda Research, he disapproved of her job performance — and she shared his opinion,” Lewis wrote.
Lewis shared an excerpt from one of the memos that Ellison had sent Bankman-Fried. “It feels like I’m doing a much worse job managing Alameda than you would if you were working on it full-time,” she wrote.
In April 2021, Ellison tweeted about “regular amphetamine use” in a thread that also talked about the “herculean” effort it took for her to get off of her couch and go for a hike.
Court filings show that Ellison’s compensation paled in comparison to other top executives. Of the $3.2 billion in payouts to the exchange’s founders and other senior employees, FTX’s head of engineering, Nishad Singh, received $587 million, co-founder Gary Wang got $246 million and $2.2 billion went to Bankman-Fried. Ellison received $6 million.
Some of Ellison’s private diary entries were leaked by Bankman-Fried to The New York Times, which published a report about them last July, months before the trial. The act ultimately landed Bankman-Fried back in jail after Kaplan revoked his bail for alleged witness tampering.
In a Google document from February 2022 shared with the Times, Ellison wrote, “I have been feeling pretty unhappy and overwhelmed with my job. … At the end of the day I can’t wait to go home and turn off my phone and have a drink and get away from it all.”
She added, “It doesn’t really feel like there’s an end in sight.”
‘Trying to fix problems’
But it was in the courtroom that jurors got to hear Ellison for the first time.
U.S. Attorney Thane Rehn said during the trial that Bankman-Fried “was using her as a front” when “in reality, he was still calling the shots at Alameda.” Over the course of her multi-day testimony, Ellison helped prosecutors build a narrative that she was acting at the direction of Bankman-Fried in helping him steal customer money from FTX and using it to help prop up Alameda, which was suffering in the wake of the crypto winter.
Ellison said Bankman-Fried was still CEO of Alameda when the funneling of money began. She said she was under the impression that it was FTX customer money because the sums exceeded the exchange’s profits and the amount of capital it had raised.
In mid-2021, when FTX bought equity in the company back from rival exchange and early investor Binance, FTX used $1 billion in customer funds for the transaction, Ellison testified.
Ellison said she considered resigning from Alameda at various points from 2019 to November 2022.
On one of her Google Docs, Ellison had a section entitled “limiting factors in scaling,” which she said referred to things that were holding back Alameda. The first thing she listed was management, including a comment on her former co-CEO Sam Trabucco.
“I feel like neither Trabucco nor I has been doing a great job of pushing on stuff,” she wrote. “We’re in the mode of maintaining status quo and trying to fix problems.”
In terms of the commingling of operations between FTX and Alameda, Ellison admitted on the witness stand that the two firms didn’t have a proper “Chinese wall” separating the businesses.
During her testimony, Ellison mostly avoided eye contact with Bankman-Fried, staring down at her hands between questions and frequently flipping her hair over her left shoulder. Bankman-Fried also often looked away, with hands clenched.
Ellison told the jury that her breakup with Bankman-Fried in the spring of 2022 affected communications between the two of them. They would talk mostly over Signal despite living in the same apartment, and they largely avoided each other outside of work.
Danielle Sassoon, the assistant U.S. attorney representing the government, told Kaplan several times “the defendant has laughed, visibly shaken his head, and scoffed,” which she said could be having an effect on Ellison “given the history of this relationship, the prior attempts to intimidate her, the power dynamic, their romantic relationship.”
Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, arrives to court in New York, US, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Secret recordings and texts
Of the hundreds of items entered into evidence during the trial, a bank of messages on encrypted app Signal was among the most calamitous for Bankman-Fried.
The government presented a series of Signal exchanges involving Bankman-Fried, Ellison, Wang and other top execs. In one such exchange, from Nov. 8, 2022, Ellison appealed to Bankman-Fried and other members of the inner circle, asking for help on optics and public messaging.
Prosecutors relied heavily on text messages sent among FTX and Alameda Research executives in the case against Sam Bankman-Fried.
Source: SDNY
She wrote, “multiple people internally asking me whether they should continue to make statements to external parties like ‘Alameda is solvent.’ should i suggest they stall instead? just stall on responding to their messages? or what?”
That day, FTX issued a pause on all customer withdrawals.
The following day, Ellison again looked to the group for guidance about how to handle an all-hands meeting for Alameda’s roughly 30 employees.
Ellison’s proposal was to tell them, “Alameda is probably going to wind down” and that there was “no pressure” to stay but help with “stuff like making sure our lenders get paid” would be “super appreciated.”
Bankman-Fried suggested she say something about there “being a future of some sort for those who are excited.”
Prosecutors relied heavily on text messages sent among FTX and Alameda Research executives in the case against Sam Bankman-Fried.
Source: SDNY
Ellison ended up divulging a lot more than that in the staff meeting, a secret recording of which was played for the jury.
“Alameda borrowed a bunch of money,” which it used to make investments, Ellison said at the meeting. But as crypto prices fell, “FTX had a shortfall of user funds” and then “users started withdrawing their funds” and they “realized they would not be able to continue.”
When she was asked by a staffer whose idea it was to plug Alameda’s loan losses with FTX customer money, she said, “Um, Sam, I guess,” and giggled.
“FTX basically always allowed Alameda to, like, borrow user funds, as far as I know,” Ellison said.
![Hyundai's small new EV has a wild aero hatch design and ducktail spoiler [Image]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/12/Hyundai-small-EV-design.jpeg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
The IONIQ 3 is set to arrive as a smaller sibling to the IONIQ 5, but it will look a little different from other Hyundai EVs.
The Hyundai IONIQ 3 will debut a new EV design
Hyundai previewed the new electric hatchback, dubbed the Concept Three, at the Munich Motor Show in September.
The “Three” is Hyundai’s first compact electric vehicle concept under the IONIQ series, set to bring a radical new design to the family.
According to Hyundai, the Concept Three “represents the next step in the company’s electrification journey.” Production is expected to begin in early 2026 at Hyundai’s manufacturing plant in Turkey, with deliveries starting shortly thereafter.
The new design, “Art of Steel,” is inspired by Hyundai’s advanced steel technology. Hyundai calls the Aero Hatch profile “a new typology that reimagines the compact EV silhouette.”
Hyundai kept a few of its signature design elements from other IONIQ EV models, like the Parametric Pixel lights at the front and rear.
With its official debut approaching, a few IONIQ 3 prototypes have been spotted driving in public in South Korea. Despite heavy camouflage, you could tell the production version was shaping up to be nearly identical to the Concept Three.
A new image from KindelAuto offers a closer look at the IONIQ 3, spotted in Europe with barely any camouflage.
You can clearly see the vehicle’s profile stays close to the concept, with a sleek, hot-hatch design and a ducktail spoiler.
The compact EV is 4,287 mm long, 1,940 mm wide, and 1,428 mm tall, with a wheelbase of 2,722 mm, or about the size of the Kia EV3 or Volkswagen ID.3.
Hyundai has yet to reveal battery specs or prices, but it’s expected to offer 58.3 kWh and 81.4 kWh battery packs, like the Kia EV3, providing a WLTP range of around 365 miles. Given the Kona Electric starts at £35,000 ($47,000), the IONIQ 3 will likely be priced closer to £25,000 ($33,700).
For those in the US, sadly, the IONIQ 3 is not expected to make the trip overseas, given America’s growing love for bigger trucks and SUVs.
The IONIQ 5 does, however, remain one of the most affordable EVs in the US, starting at under $35,000 with leases as low as $189 per month.
If you’re considering an EV, Hyundai’s lineup is absolutely worth checking out — offering over 300 miles of range, fast charging, modern tech, at a price that’s actually reasonable. Check out the links below to see what’s available by you.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk went on a podcast this week to express regret over the time he spent trying to destroy the American government, claiming that he wouldn’t do it again.
In the first half of this year, Musk took a position advising convicted felon Donald Trump (who cannot legally hold office in the US) on what essential government jobs to trim.
He named the group he led the “Department of Government Efficiency,” despite that it was never an actual government department, nor did it do a whole lot to increase efficiency as we will see below.
Musk claimed before taking the position that he could save the government $2 trillion – which was always going to be literally impossible, given the amount of discretionary spending in the US budget, as anyone with a passing interest in American government could have told you at the time.
Unsurprisingly, Musk was unable to succeed in the impossible cuts he had proposed. After less than half a year (incidentally, not far off from the 130-day cap for unofficial advisory positions), Musk left the position amid a fiery breakup with Mr. Trump. The breakup led to a big drop in Tesla stock, which had been inflated due to expectations of corruption.
All in all, Musk claims that he cut around $200 billion from the government’s budget, but actual analyses show that those numbers were fake and in fact that his actions likely increased the budget deficit, rather than decreasing it. This is due to the disruption in necessary government services, higher costs for employee severance, and lost revenue for the government as ultra-wealthy tax cheats will be able to get off without paying their fair share.
And, in the interim, republicans passed a law that gives away $4 trillion to those same wealthy elites, adding $3.3 trillion to the deficit. That number is 16 times larger than even the inflated $200 billion “savings” number Musk claims.
How Musk’s actions harmed Tesla, not just the US
But Musk’s actions cosplaying as a government official had other effects than his failure to effectively cut waste: they turned public opinion against his companies, mainly Tesla.
Over the last couple years, Musk has increasingly tried to involve himself in politics, both in the US and abroad. His politics have largely focused on pushing white supremacist nonsense including support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitler, and funding and supporting groups that oppose renewable energy and vehicle electrification. He’s even rhetorically got into climate change denial himself.
These actions have directly harmed Tesla through loss of expected revenue, and have also reduced the brand’s profile in the public eye. Tesla is now the only EV brand with negative perception, and it’s due to Musk himself. His actions have driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away – including business customers.
As a result, Tesla’s sales have been falling both in the US and around the globe in a rising EV market. All told, one study found that he cost Tesla over 1 million sales in the US alone with his braindead political takes. Even his own company had to chide him.
It wasn’t hard to see this coming
These results were eminently foreseeable – anyone can tell you that business leaders typically should remain neutral on politics as a rule, and generally only speak on issues that directly involve their company or industry.
Wading into wedge issues and identity politics as a business leader can only serve to turn off customers, and since negative motivations are generally stronger than positive ones, you will net lose sales even if you appeal to some portion of the population with your advocacy.
And if you do advocate for something, it should probably be for something that will help your companies, rather than hurt them.
But Elon Musk is different. Unlike most business leaders, he has millions of useful idiots at his beck and call on twitter at any time (and it is indeed where he spends all of his time), ready and willing to tell him that all of his ideas are genius, no matter how braindead they are, or how recycled they are from his rage-filled feed which seems to be his only source of information these days. Why should conventional wisdom apply to someone who is constantly told conventional wisdom doesn’t apply to him?
And so, he ignored – or rather, probably didn’t even see, given the echo chamber he has formed around himself – the conventional wisdom telling him what a bad idea all of this was. And now, years later, he’s finally showing the slightest moment of lucidity that perhaps all of the above was not a great use of time.
Musk finally recognizes what we’ve been telling him all along
This week, Musk went on a podcast (hosted by Katie Miller, wife of American white supremacist Stephen Miller) and claimed that his advisory board was “a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful,” which is a rather middling assessment given his big initial claims of being able to save the government trillions of dollars.
But further, he went on to say that he wouldn’t do it all over again, and that “instead of doing DOGE, I would have, basically, built … worked on my companies.”
He said that if he had done that instead, “they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.” This is a reference to Tesla protests, which have largely not included burning anything, but which have been widespread globally.
We, of course, agree that that would have been a better course of action. Which is why we said it at the time. Perhaps it’s time to get off twitter and read some real thoughts for once, Mr. Musk. We’re not sure if the damage you’ve done is repairable (though it was certainly preventable), but as they say, “garbage in, garbage out” – the more nonsense you read, the more nonsense you’ll continue to get up to.
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BMW is the latest major automaker to officially gain access to the Tesla Supercharger network in North America. Starting today, BMW EV drivers in the US can access over 25,000 Tesla Superchargers, adding a massive boost to the charging options for owners of the i4, iX, and other electric models from the German automaker.
It follows a wave of other automakers gaining access over the last year as the industry transitions to NACS (North American Charging Standard), Tesla’s proprietary connector that has now become the standard.
BMW confirmed today that the update is effective immediately. Owners can find Tesla Superchargers directly in their vehicle’s navigation system and the My BMW app.
However, like most other automakers making this transition, there is hardware involved. Current BMW EVs, which are equipped with CCS ports, will require a CCS-to-NACS adapter to use the vast majority of Tesla’s V3 and V4 Superchargers.
According to BMW, official adapters will go on sale as accessories starting in Q2 2026. That is a bit of a wait, but in the meantime, some third-party adapters are already on the market.
For those lucky enough to live near one of Tesla’s few “Magic Dock” locations (Superchargers with a built-in CCS adapter), any BMW EV can charge immediately without needing to buy extra hardware.
BMW also clarified its timeline for native NACS ports, which will eliminate the need for an adapter entirely. The transition begins with the 2026 BMW i5 M60, followed by other models throughout the year, including the highly anticipated Neue Klasse iX3, which is expected to be a competitor of the higher-end trims of Tesla’s popular Model Y.
Interestingly, there is a software hurdle for some specific 2026 models. BMW noted that the 2026 iX and i5 eDrive40 will not be able to use Tesla Superchargers until they receive a remote software upgrade, also scheduled for Q2 2026.
One of the biggest pain points for non-Tesla EVs using the Supercharger network has been the user experience. Tesla has set a high bar with its “plug and play” ecosystem.
BMW seems to have done a good job integrating this. The automaker says that its Plug & Charge is supported at Tesla stations. You won’t need the Tesla app to start a session. Instead, billing is handled through the customer’s Shell Recharge account, which is integrated into the My BMW app.
Pricing will follow Tesla’s standard rate structure for non-Tesla vehicles, which is generally higher than what Tesla owners pay unless you pay a monthly membership fee.
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