When crypto exchange FTX went up in flames in 2022 it lost billions of investors’ money and forever altered the public’s view of digital currencies.
It quickly emerged company CEO and Effective Altruist Sam Bankman-Fried had illegally moved billions from the exchange to prop up his hedge fund, run — at least on paper — by his one-time girlfriend and co-worker Caroline Ellison.
The incident has been made into new Netflix show “The Altruists,” billed as “a toxic love story inspired by a real fraud” which has appalled and gobsmacked those who had a ringside seat to the collapse.
FTX’s former chief operating officer, Constance Wang, says trying to portray what happened through the lens of a love story is laughable.
“[Bankman-Fried’s] entire goal was to change the world, make an impact, do good. Love, relationship, family seemed a bit secondary to him.
“The ‘Me and you against the world’ romantic thing? No f—ing way,” Wang told The Post in her first exclusive interview about FTX’s fall.
Wang is even a character in the show, played by Madison Hu, but couldn’t even get through the trailer when a friend showed it her over breakfast. “I literally physically threw up because it just made me feel so uncomfortable,” after about 40 seconds, she said.
She also slams the romance storyline at the center of the show as laughable.
“For the longest time in the company we did not know they were dating, and we did not know Sam was capable of dating at all, because he was working all the time,” Wang said.
“I had a group chat with some of my close employees, and I was shocked. I was like, ‘Do you guys know this?’ They were like, ‘No. We thought you knew?’”
The show charts SBF, Ellison and their followers through their ill-fated journey to revolutionize the financial system along idealistic Effective Altruist lines, supposedly using their money and intelligence to make the world a better place.
However, SBF bought $35m party home in the Bahamas and took $8 billion of FTX investors’ money to use in Alameda Research, causing the whole project to collapse. As federal law doesn’t make allowances for people who claim they will do good later, he’s now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud and money laundering.
Wang said she went to a couple of Effective Altruist parties thrown by SBF and the movement — also at the center of AI company Anthropic and other tech giants — wasn’t for her.
“They are really smart people. They talk about math, physics, biology. If it’s a dinner gathering on a Friday or Saturday evening, I would prefer more relaxed topics. But for them, those are their relaxed topics.
“You can hang out once, twice. But for a long time, it becomes hard.”
At the center of the operation were around 10 people who lived in the Bahamas with SBF and Ellison and were “all paired up in romantic relationships with each other,” at one point, according to industry news site Coindesk.com
Ellison — who was also federally prosecuted after the collapse — claimed she had been polyamorous in since-deleted Tumblr post from 2020, writing: “When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past. But tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterised as something like ‘imperial Chinese harem.’”
Such salacious behavior was never witnessed by Wang. “I honestly did not know the word ‘orgy’ until I saw it in an article,” she said. “I had to Google it.”
Instead, she claims “the company was a bunch of nerds” and parties she attended were mostly filled with “chess and board games.”
It’s unclear which version of the parties Netflix — who did not respond to a request for comment — has dramatized in its series, but Wang claims from what she’s seen they’ve already taken significant artistic liberties.
She noted the SBF she knew could barely hold another person’s gaze — in stark contrast to the confident hustler in the trailer for “The Altruists,” played by Anthony Boyle.
“When I first met Sam in 2018 in Singapore, he was entirely incapable of looking at people’s eyes when talking to others,” she said. “He would look at the floor and then he’d shake his legs.”
Ellison, portrayed by Julia Garner on-screen, appears somewhat forward and aggressive in the trailer, but was “gentle” and “soft-spoken” in real life, Wang said. “She’s never aggressive. If you ask her a question, she will take a split second to think, and then start talking.”
Quinn Li, a former FTX marketing manager who also moved to the Bahamas to work alongside SBF thought the trailer was “very, very bad.”
“It brings in so much romance and emotional drama, when there really wasn’t much of that. The reality is that everyone was a very rational person,” Li told The Post.
“In the trailer, I didn’t see how smart Sam was, or how smart Caroline was. It looked like two silly cats in love.”
Wang recalled the fateful night in November 2022 when the exchange crashed. Triggered by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao saying he would dump his FTX tokens, customers pulled about $6 billion from the exchange in 72 hours.
Wang ran the VIP team that handled the biggest traders, and she said the word from the top was to stay calm.
“The internal message we got from Sam is, ‘Let people withdraw. We’re fine,'” she said.
Some loyal customers even put their money back in. “No one, including me, doubted what Sam was telling us, because we had this deep, deep trust in him,” Wang said.
When withdrawals stopped going through, “we were told, ‘Oh, it’s because the system has some problems. Please tell people to be patient. We are fine.'”
Then, around 3 a.m., SBF finally admitted why withdrawals had been stuck.
“He said, ‘We do not have enough money to meet all the withdrawals on the exchange,'” she said. “I just bounced from my bed. I was in shock. I was shaking.”
SBF invited Wang to the company’s “war room,” where she found him, Ellison, co-founder Gary Wang and engineering chief Nishad Singh.
“That was the first time I saw a spreadsheet laying out how much FTX was in the hole. I think $8 billion. And I was shocked. I was like, ‘How? How could this happen?'”
The crash came at great cost to everyone in the FTX team.
In her final conversation with SBF in the Bahamas, Wang said she asked whether he understood what his employees were going through: being blamed for something they knew nothing about, losing their life savings and years of hard work.
“He reacted quite mildly,” she said. “I remember not being sure he really felt the weight of it, and wondering whether the human cost had ever been part of how he weighed his decisions.”
“Sam’s mistake was that he overestimated his own intelligence,” Li added. “He really was smart. He could spot a lot of opportunities in the market. But the rest of the market wasn’t as easy to fool as he thought, honestly.”
Ellison, who pleaded guilty and testified against SBF, was released in January after about 14 months behind bars. She now works at Manifund, a San Francisco charity, using the alias “Carol.”
The collapse left an estimated nine million customers and investors facing billions of dollars in losses.
FTX’s bankruptcy team has since clawed back around $16.5 billion to repay customers at least 118% of their balances, but priced at November 2022 levels. Then, Bitcoin traded around $16,000 — a fraction of the more than $80,000 it fetches today.
Wang has never been accused of wrongdoing but knows people ask: how could the COO not know?
“If people want to hide something from you, they make sure they hide it well.”
She ran FTX’s global growth, opening offices in Japan, Singapore and Dubai and points out she invested huge sums of her own money into the exchange and its related coin. Although her holdings hit 10 figures at their peak, she returned home to Hong Kong with just $80,000.
The Justice Department also investigated her for about a year, Wang said, but she was never charged and not called to testify at SBF’s trial. “I do not possess material information that would help them make the case,” she said. “That’s basically a reflection of how little I know.”
The trial was especially hard for her, though. Reading the coverage for mentions of her name, she said, everything shattered “from the inside out, except my body.” She fell into a depression and even had suicidal thoughts, until old friends rallied around her and eventually brought her out of it.
She has since gone back into business and in 2025 co-founded Pacifica, a crypto trading platform that has made $10 billion in trades in the past month, according to DefiLlama.
“I feel very grateful that I’m not only free, but I’m able to start another company,” she said.
However, she was very surprised Netflix never contracted her to hear her side of the story, or even got in touch with her, before writing a whole character based around her.
“I searched my mailbox and didn’t find anything from Netflix. I certainly did not receive anything about the story, about the script.
“I do not know how I am going to be portrayed, and I am a bit nervous, to be honest with you.”
However, she doesn’t harbor grudges against the people who she helped build the exchange and her career with.
“I don’t hate Sam. I don’t hate any of them. I’m just sad and disappointed,” Wang added.