Former FTX chief operating officer Constance Wang has challenged Netflix’s planned drama series “The altruists,” arguing that its apparent focus on the relationship between Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison risks reducing one of cryptocurrency’s largest fraud cases to “a toxic love story.”
Wang made the criticism after watching roughly 40 seconds of the show’s trailer, according to the interview described in the supplied material. Netflix has marketed the series as being inspired by the real events surrounding FTX, Bankman-Fried and Ellison, the former chief executive of Alameda Research.
Her objection goes beyond a dispute over television casting or dramatic license. FTX’s bankruptcy involved billions of dollars in customer money, an emergency collapse that spread across crypto markets, and a criminal case that resulted in Bankman-Fried receiving a 25-year federal prison sentence. A relationship-driven retelling could give audiences a simplified account of a failure that prosecutors and bankruptcy officials have documented as a long-running misuse of customer assets.
A drama based on a fraud case that affected millions
FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022 after a rapid withdrawal crisis exposed a major shortfall in the exchange’s finances. Federal prosecutors said Bankman-Fried had directed the diversion of roughly $8 billion in FTX customer funds to Alameda Research, the affiliated trading firm he also controlled.
A federal jury convicted Bankman-Fried in 2023 on fraud and money-laundering-related charges. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sentenced him in March 2024 to 25 years in prison after finding that the conduct involved extensive losses, false statements to customers and lenders, and obstruction of justice.
Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud charges and became a key government witness at Bankman-Fried’s trial. Her testimony described Alameda’s access to FTX customer deposits and detailed the internal arrangements that allowed the trading firm to draw on exchange funds. She was sentenced to two years in prison in September 2024, a penalty that reflected her cooperation with prosecutors.
The supplied material says Ellison was released in January after serving about 14 months in custody and later began work at the San Francisco charity Manifund under the name Carol. Her post-prison life may offer material for a television adaptation, but the court case was anchored in financial records, internal messages and testimony about the movement of customer money.
Wang recalls an $8 billion gap
Wang said she was pulled into an internal FTX “war room” during the final days of the exchange, where a spreadsheet estimated a funding gap of around $8 billion. She said the meeting included Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and former engineering director Nishad Singh.
The figure closely matches the amount identified in the criminal case as customer money that had been misappropriated. Wang also described internal communications that reassured employees withdrawals could continue and that the company remained financially sound, even as the scale of the deficit was becoming clear.
Those accounts place her in the immediate operational circle around FTX’s collapse, though Wang was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice. She said investigators scrutinized her for about a year before ending their inquiry without bringing a case and that she was not called as a witness during Bankman-Fried’s trial.
Wang said her own holdings had once exceeded $1 billion on paper, but that she returned to Hong Kong with about $80,000 after FTX failed. Her account illustrates how the collapse hit senior employees as well as customers, although the legal proceedings found that a small leadership group held unusually concentrated control over the exchange and Alameda.
Court filings showed Bankman-Fried and other executives lived together in luxury accommodation in the Bahamas while operating the businesses. Prosecutors cited Bankman-Fried’s purchase of a $35 million Bahamas property as part of the spending and political-donation activity enabled by the companies’ funds.
The run that exposed FTX’s finances
FTX’s crisis accelerated after Changpeng Zhao, then chief executive of Binance, said in November 2022 that Binance would sell its holdings of FTT, FTX’s exchange-issued token. The announcement intensified concerns about the relationship between FTX and Alameda, which held substantial quantities of FTT on its balance sheet.
Customers withdrew about $6 billion from FTX over the following 72 hours, according to testimony and accounts of the bankruptcy period. Bankman-Fried later told employees in an early-morning meeting that the platform lacked enough money to satisfy all withdrawal requests.
The speed of the run exposed a basic mismatch between what customers believed they held on FTX and the funds the company could actually produce. Customers treated exchange balances as readily available deposits, while prosecutors said much of the money had been transferred to Alameda and used for trading, venture investments, political contributions, real estate and other expenditures.
That sequence is likely harder to translate into a character-led drama than a story about interpersonal conflict. Yet it remains central to why the FTX case became a defining event for the sector: the failure was not simply a bad trade or a market panic, but a collapse in controls over customer assets.
Repayment plan leaves a price gap
The FTX bankruptcy estate has said it recovered about $16.5 billion and expects to repay at least 118% of eligible customer claims. That recovery is unusually high for a major corporate bankruptcy and reflects the estate’s asset sales, litigation recoveries and rising values in some holdings.
The calculation has also drawn criticism from former customers because claims are valued in U.S. dollars based on cryptocurrency prices at the time of FTX’s November 2022 bankruptcy filing. Bitcoin traded near $16,000 then, compared with prices above $80,000 cited in the supplied material.
As a result, a customer who held bitcoin on FTX may receive more than the dollar value assigned to their claim, while receiving far less than the current value of the bitcoin they would have held outside the platform. The estate’s repayment process resolves legal claims against a bankrupt company; it cannot restore the market gains attached to assets that were no longer available for withdrawal during the case.
Wang said Netflix did not contact her before developing a character based on her and that she found no outreach after searching her emails. Her criticism points to a familiar tension in dramatizations of financial scandals: compelling characters can make a complicated story accessible, but they can also shift attention away from the people whose deposits were trapped when the business failed.
For FTX customers, the lasting record is likely to remain the court findings and bankruptcy process rather than the series’ portrayal of the people who ran the exchange.
After FTX’s collapse, understanding crypto risks matters more than ever—start with our guide 5 ways to improve crypto safety.
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