Caroline Ellison took the stand for the second day in the trial against her former boss and ex-boyfriend, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Her testimony was colorful and spanned multiple topics, from Thai sex workers to her private diary entries, to behind-the-scenes details of the crypto exchange’s collapse.
At one point during her questioning, prosecutors pulled up a screenshot of messages she and Bankman-Fried exchanged around the time FTX was imploding, in which Ellison wrote, “this is the best mood I’ve been in in like a year.”
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Asked to explain herself on Wednesday, Ellison broke down in tears. “To be clear, that was overall the worst week of my life,” she said, adding that “I felt this sense of relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore.”
In November 2022, at the time she sent the message, Bankman-Fried was also confused by her tone. “Wow,” he wrote, along with “uh” and “congrats?”
“Because shit’s exciting?” he asked.
Ellison elaborated that, after months of lying about the financial health of FTX and Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, she was glad that the end was nearing “one way or another.”
FTX customers were withdrawing billions of dollars from the business en masse, leaving it functionally insolvent. “Now that it’s actually happening it just feels great to get it over with,” she wrote.
Earlier on Wednesday, Ellison had testified about Bankman-Fried’s allegedly loose approach to global regulation. At one point, the company bribed Chinese officials $150 million to help unfreeze locked accounts, she said, adding that the incident was referred to as “the thing.”
The company had tried a different approach, she said—shifting money to accounts linked to Thai sex workers, though the gambit failed.
During the company’s eventual collapse, she and other executives frequently strategized in an encrypted chat app about how much information to withhold from employees and the public; Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph, was listed as a member of the group.
After exiting the courthouse on Wednesday, Ellison quickly climbed into a waiting black SUV. It was a smoother departure than on Tuesday, when she inadvertently got into the wrong car, forcing her to reenter the media scrum.
