Future federal reserve chair Caroline Ellison.
Read this and started to laugh and then got sad.
“Hey, she’s got great experience in that world, and is obviously very smart!”
Only after she finishes filming the next Lord of The Rings trilogy.
Precious?
future linkedin influencer,future fail-forwarder
Yes she cooperated and pleaded early, but damn, she got off easy compared to SBF.
It turns out sentencing cares whether you’re cooperative and contrite or you stand by having done nothing wrong.
...the primary effect of which is that fewer than 4% of criminal cases go to trial, and our prison, parole, and probation systems are full of people who pled to crimes they did not commit, and poison trees of evidence are intentionally and ruthlessly planted without challenge or consideration by a jurist.
Well running an investment firm into the ground is more legal than using deposited funds in an exchange to bail out an investment firm that is being run into the ground.
She didn't just run Alameda to the ground. She knew Alameda was using FTX customer funds, which makes her directly complicit. She got off easy because of her cooperation and guilty plea.
she pocketed nothing, lived modestly (her complices earned much more) and was invaluable to the case.
Eh, I am pretty sure Trump is gonna end up pardoning SBF. It just seems like the sort of thing that is going to happen.
Not sure what he would gain from that. The crypto community largely backed him in the last election, and pardoning SBF would seriously piss them off.
> Not sure what he would gain from that.
A convenient distraction, perhaps.
> "Not sure what he would gain from that."
Besides the ~$1 million a head he's openly selling[0] pardons for?
Why wouldn't he pardon a white-collar felon fraudster? This president has pardoned dozens of those[1]—frauds who had no reason at all to be deserving of clemency, other than being incredibly rich. He's pardoned fraudsters who defrauded thousands of victims[2]. He's pardoned a fraudster convicted of fraud, who committed fraud again, and he pardoned them a second time[3]. There are no limits.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-presidential-pardo... ("Inside the New Fast Track to a Presidential Pardon / Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executi... ("List of recipients of executive clemency from Trump")
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-g... ("Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence / David Gentile had been found guilty for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.")
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/us/politics/trump-fraudst... ("Trump Sets Fraudster Free From Prison for a Second Time")
> "The crypto community largely backed him in the last election"
Gee golly; I wonder why.
From Trump's POV, $1 million is probably not worth the ensuing backlash.
FWIW, prediction markets don't seem to believe he will be pardoned either[0].
[0] https://polymarket.com/event/who-will-trump-pardon-before-20...
It is disappointing to me that people can look at the list of infamous people he has already pardoned, who have paid him, and then expect that he won't continue acting on trend, just because some shallow-book manipulable prediction market, which is primarily a money laundering tool for event fixers, tells us that it's "not likely".
Wha backlash? Trump pardoned a Honduran ex-president convicted of smuggling tons of drugs, right in the midst of using the military to bomb boats for unproven drug smuggling, and kidnapped Maduro presumably because of drugs too (or was it oil?). Zero repercussions except for futile anger from internet weirdos like me.
This administration seems to relish getting away with things that would destroy any other presidency.
By the way, have any more boats been bombed since the US ousted Maduro?
> Not sure what he would gain from that.
What? It's a bribe, he gains money. He doesn't care about pissing anyone off, he's (probably) not running for reelection, he cares about money, it's really that simple.
He also cares about normalizing financial fraud, establishing that it’s no big deal.
Ok, but does SBF still control enough money that Trump would care about it?
Trump could do it... to piss off SBF himself (second biggest donor to Biden/democrats behind Soros)
SBF claims to have spread money equally between the parties, but hid the Republican donations:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-bankman-fried-says-donate...
Trump already got donor money and he's a lame duck. 'Pissing off crypto community' does not factor highly into his decision making processes. Pardoning him would probably help crypto go up.
Does SBF still have money?
probably some secret keys stashed somewhere
Do his parents?
Link does not actually say anything about Ellison being released? Try this instead:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/ftx-crypt...
Mismatch of title; linked article is not about her release. For that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728538
But it's true: master has given Dobby a sock
Is it true she still owes billions to the federal government?
$11B!
The reduced sentences for Ellison, Wang, and Singh make sense in light of their cooperation. This is how plea deals work. The conviction of SBF seems simple in retrospect, but when the SDNY inked these deals, they did not yet know how just easy SBF would make their case for them, with all the tampering and perjury and obstinance.
Nonetheless, we should not be fooled by a sort of "Svengali defense", where Caroline or the others claim that they were beguiled by a dark charismatic genius who forced them into the crimes. The entire inner circle is super guilty of flagrant crimes. The shorter sentences are an artifact of plea bargains, and not a sign of lesser guilt.
comma in the title would be nice!
> Without denying the Commission’s allegations, Ellison, Wang, and Singh consented to the entry of final judgments, subject to court approval, in which they agreed to be permanently enjoined from violating the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder and Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, and to 5-year conduct-based injunctions. Ellison also consented to a 10-year officer-and-director bar, and Wang and Singh consented to 8-year officer-and-director bars.
That’s a really light sentence for someone who defrauded people out of billions. Meanwhile many languish in prison for a lot less. It’s a two tier justice system, and the wealthy can get out of consequences with the right connections or donations.
Next up, Elizabeth Holmes - once her family donates enough to the MAGA PAC.
> That’s a really light sentence for someone who defrauded people out of billions
I don't excuse anything that she did, but didn't 98% of investors get everything back with interest?
Investors? No. Customers? They were paid the cash value of their crypto holdings at the time of bankruptcy. Thanks to a massive bull run in crypto between bankruptcy and payout, customers were able to be paid back in “full” even with the fraud. However, when BTC is sitting at $60k and your missing BTC is being paid back at $17k, you’re not exactly going to be feeling giddy.
And that price at the time of the bankruptcy was artificially deflated by FTX dumping customer assets to try to cover up their fraud.
They did, but not through any virtue or skill on her part. That was just the plain luck of Bitcoin happening to go way way up before the bankruptcy estate paid out using what it had, and the court that sentenced her couldn't know that would happen and if it somehow had, should not have taken it into account. You wouldn't advocate a lighter sentence for murder if the bullet had miraculously been struck by lightning on its way to the target's skull and thereby missed.
Well, actually you would, because that would change it from murder to attempted murder.
Only by accident of BTC's appreciation while the fraud+bankruptcy were underway. Not sure that should be a mitigating factor.
Maybe, on paper, some day in the indeterminate future, and likely without interest.
For comparison, MtGox went tits up twelve years ago in 2014 and they're still figuring out repayments for its BTC holders, which is both a hell of a lot simpler than FTX's grab bag of own tokens etc and has gone up a zillion percent since 2014.
The customers were not fully repaid, except in an artificial accounting sense using post-crash marks. Nevertheless, the recovery was far more successful than most people expected at the time.
I wanna say that was the FTX story, not Alameda.
It was all one company in the end, through co-mingling and lack of controls.
Criminal law deals with intent not with outcomes.
Hence why "attempted murder" is a thing.
they got back 100% at a lower price, around 20k per btc I think.
100%
Even if you "cooperate", that shouldn't be an 80-90% sentence reduction. She was part of the fraud, consciously, for years!
Even if we all agree this is true, you still have to think practically. If we don't give a big incentive to turn on your co-conspirators, no one will turn and you might not be able to convict any of them.
>Can someone think of the criminals?
SBF was toast with or without Ellison's testimony.
It should be the other way around. You get 10 years. You don't want to cooperate? Great! You get another 10.
As I understand it, intent matters a lot, and that is typically through the testimony of people who had access to SBF in an environment where he was comfortable speaking candidly.
Those people are often accomplices. Sometimes the medium large fish get off if they chop up the big fish.
There are the way things should be, and there are the way things are.
SBF got no more than 25. there is no way she would have gotten more than that.
That’s a really light sentence for someone who defrauded people out of billions.
She profited very little compared to the others and was invaluable for the case
Good luck finding a friend group after this. It’s gonna be right wing crypto bros only from now on.
Read her archived blog she was into freaky stuff
She's probably one of the most hated person in crypto...
There are hundreds of shady crypto projects in the world right now, each one shadier than the last.
World order is out of the door, and has been for a while -- they are all probably fighting amongst themselves to get her onto their board ASAP.
I can fix her