Ex-FTX boss finds Sam Bankman-Fried ‘love story’ series on Netflix laughable: ‘No f—ing way’

Ex-FTX executives slam Netflix series

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.

Disputing the romantic narrative

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.

Recalling the night of the crash

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.”

Moving on after the fallout

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.”