Was Caroline Ellison a Main Character or the Fall Girl?

How the 28-year-old CEO LARP-ed her way into the collapse of FTX.

- BRIDGET READ

THE YEAR IS 2020,” the story begins. “Your heroine is working for a digital currency exchange that allows citizens of repressive regimes to move money anywhere in the world.” The author appears to be 25-year-old Caroline Ellison, writing in her now-deleted unsigned Tumblr diary a few months into the pandemic. (The Tumblr links directly to Ellison’s public Twitter account.) Protests against the Chinese government had engulfed Hong Kong, where she was working at the crypto-trading firm Alameda Research. “The authoritarian central government has just announced its plan to crack down on her scrappy, lovable city-state,” the story continues. “She must choose between staying and facing a future of increasingly harsh and technologically sophisticated censorship and repression, or venturing into the outside world.” At the end of the post, the narrator switches from the third person to the first. “Like yes, I took my current job with the plan of becoming a sci-fi protagonist. But even so this feels a little too on the nose.”

Ellison saw herself at the start of her hero’s arc, though she probably didn’t imagine that the journey would take her from trader to CEO to a possible accomplice in what could be the biggest financial fraud in history. When it was revealed that Alameda had used funds from FTX customers to cover its losses from risky trades, Ellison, “her voice shaking,” told employees in a meeting that she had known about the money transfers between the two companies, according to the New York