Caroline Ellison says she wasn’t an ambitious person until she met Sam Bankman-Fried

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2 years ago

October 12, 2023

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Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, arrives to court in New York, US, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023. Ellison, ex-girlfriend of FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, outlined for a New York jury Wednesday how she worked with Sam Bankman-Fried to deceive lenders and customers to build his multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency empire, and their failed attempts to prevent a spectacular collapse. Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Caroline Ellison, the government’s star witness in its fraud case against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, took the stand for cross-examination on Thursday morning as the trial continued in a courthouse in downtown Manhattan.

Ellison was CEO of Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research, and also dated him on and off while working with him. She pleaded guilty in December 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. Part of the 28-year-old’s plea deal with the government has involved cooperating with the prosecution’s case against Bankman-Fried.

On Thursday morning, Ellison faced aggressive questioning from Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, Mark Cohen, who spoke over her several times as she tried to testify. But Judge Lewis Kaplan also appeared annoyed at the fact that Cohen requested two sidebar conferences early on to pursue lines of questioning.

Ellison mostly avoided eye contact with the defendant, as she has during the past two days of testimony, staring down at her hands in between questions and frequently flipping her hair over her left shoulder.

Part of the cross-examination revolved around Sam Trabucco, who was Alameda’s co-CEO with Ellison from October 2021 until August 2022, months before both companies collapsed into bankruptcy as investors raced to withdraw funds from FTX amid allegations that it had used customer funds to help paper over losses at Alameda as the crypto market tanked.

Ellison testified that she and Trabucco began handling a lot of Alameda’s day-to-day business as early as 2020, well before officially taking over, and that there were periods of time where Bankman-Fried would not talk to them much. By 2021, she testified, Bankman-Fried had largely stopped coming into the Alameda office and had left more of the job to Ellison. She said that Trabucco was good under pressure and at handling extreme trading situations.

She also testified that the firm had attempted to hire several people to oversee Alameda’s accounting, but they all left and Ellison took on the role of preparing Alameda’s balance sheets from Ryan Salame, who had been the CEO of a subsidiary called FTX Digital Markets. In previous testimony, Ellison admitted that she had used FTX customer money to pay Alameda’s loans, and alleged she did so at Bankman-Fried’s suggestion.

Ellison also testified that Bankman-Fried had discussed adding a new co-CEO when Trabucco left, but she resisted.

When Cohen asked if she considered herself an ambitious person, Ellison said she didn’t think of herself as particularly ambitious, but became more so with Bankman-Fried’s encouragement as she worked for him.

Ellison’s cross-examination is likely to continue throughout Thursday morning.

Technology

Sam Altman says OpenAI will top $20 billion in annualized revenue this year, hundreds of billions by 2030

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2 hours ago

November 6, 2025

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Sam Altman says OpenAI will top billion in annualized revenue this year, hundreds of billions by 2030

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

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday that the artificial intelligence startup is on track to generate more than $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate this year, with plans to grow to hundreds of billions in sales by 2030.

The company has inked more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure deals in recent months to try and build out the data centers it says are needed to meet growing demand. The staggering sum has raised questions from investors and others in the industry about where OpenAI will come up with the money.

“We are trying to build the infrastructure for a future economy powered by AI, and given everything we see on the horizon in our research program, this is the time to invest to be really scaling up our technology,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “Massive infrastructure projects take quite awhile to build, so we have to start now.”

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet following the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. The startup is currently valued at $500 billion, though it’s still not profitable.

In September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that OpenAI was on track to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

Friar caught the attention of the Trump administration this week after she saying at at event that OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could help the company finance its investments in cutting-edge chips.

She clarified those comments late Wednesday, writing in a post on LinkedIn that OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments.

“I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point,” Friar wrote. “As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be “no federal bailout for AI.” He wrote in a post on X that if one frontier model company in the U.S. fails, another will take its place.

Altman said Thursday that OpenAI does “not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters.” He said taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor decisions, and that “if we get it wrong, that’s on us.”

“This is the bet we are making, and given our vantage point, we feel good about it,” Altman wrote. “But we of course could be wrong, and the market—not the government—will deal with it if we are.”

WATCH: Trump AI czar David Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’ after OpenAI CFO’s comments

Technology

Apple’s AI roadmap looks brighter — plus, Costco delivers upbeat sales numbers

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2 hours ago

November 6, 2025

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Apple's AI roadmap looks brighter — plus, Costco delivers upbeat sales numbers

Technology

Meta reportedly projected 10% of 2024 sales came from scam, fraud ads

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4 hours ago

November 6, 2025

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Meta reportedly projected 10% of 2024 sales came from scam, fraud ads

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. US President Donald Trump said he would be imposing tariffs on semiconductor imports “very shortly” but spare goods from companies like Apple Inc. that have pledged to boost their US investments. Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Will Oliver | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta projected that 10% of its overall sales in 2024, or about $16 billion, came from running online ads for scams and banned goods, according to a Thursday report from Reuters.

Those kinds of ads included promotions for “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products,” according to the Reuters report, which was based on internal company documents. Those documents showed the company’s attempts to measure the prevalence of fraudulent advertising on its apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Meta brought in more than $164.5 billion in overall sales for 2024. Last week, the company said that third-quarter sales rose 26% year-over-year to $51.24 billion and that it lifted the low end of its total expenses for the year by $2 billion as part of its massive investments into artificial intelligence.

The Reuters report cited a December 2024 document that showed how Meta each year generates roughly $7 billion in annualized sales from so-called “higher risk” scam ads, which are promotions that are clearly deceptive. Each day, Meta shows users an estimated 15 billion of these higher risk scam ads, the Reuters report said, citing a separate document.

Although some of the documents show that Meta aims to reduce the amount of bogus ads on its platform, the Reuters report also said that other documents suggest the company is concerned that its business projections could be impacted by any abrupt removal of the fraudulent promotions.

A Meta spokesperson said that the company “aggressively” addresses scam and fraud ads on its apps. The projections that 10% of the company’s 2024 ad sales came from bunk ads “was a rough and overly-inclusive estimate rather than a definitive or final figure; in fact, subsequent review revealed that many of these ads weren’t violating at all,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the leaked documents present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams by focusing on our efforts to assess the scale of the challenge, not the full range of actions we have taken to address the problem,” the spokesperson said.

WATCH: Wall Street backs AI winners, and Meta’s not one of them this quarter.