FTX and the “Imperial Chinese Harem”

On the Sexual Politics, Race Science, and Cult Indoctrination of Pure Reason

Welcome to quite a few new subscribers in recent months. Roughly twice a month, I publish draft excerpts from Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried and the Tech Utopians, coming in October from Repeater Books. These are works-in-progress, meaning there may be errors or omissions, and they’ll change substantially before publication - any feedback is always appreciated.

This is an excerpt from what’s currently Chapter 4: The Logic of the Code.

Caroline Ellison: Sexual Market-Maker, Fraudster, Race Scientist.

Caroline Ellison was hired at Alameda Research on false pretenses, having been promised Effective Altruist paradise and finding instead a firm in chaos and losing money. She would face many further indignities, including the fact that Bankman-Fried kept the relationship secret for its entire duration. Yet she stuck with him all the way to the bitter end. Why?

On the one hand, she appears to have genuinely loved Sam Bankman-Fried, who was magnetic and charming despite his emotional remoteness. But the attraction, and the relationship, were deeply fraught. In late 2018, in a note to Bankman-Fried, she confessed to “pretty strong romantic feelings” that “can often be positive or feel good but are on net unpleasant.” She described Bankman-Fried as regularly “having sex with me, then ignoring me for a few months.”

For his part, Bankman-Fried never returned her depth of feeling. Most dramatically, he suddenly moved Alameda Research from the Bay Area to Hong Kong after reading Ellison’s tortured love note. While the move was ostensibly for regulatory reasons, throwing an obstacle in Ellison’s path may have been an additional motive.

Ellison ultimately followed Bankman-Fried to Hong Kong, where their secret relationship continued. As his focus shifted to building FTX, she was elevated to leadership of Alameda Research as co-CEO, then sole CEO. She was one of the longest-standing employees of Alameda, and a skilled trader, so this wasn’t out of the blue. But the arrangement would also become central to Sam’s fraud: Ellison’s independence as leader of Alameda was always a convenient fiction. As a person beholden to him on a deep emotional level, she would prove easy to control when Sam needed her to do something unethical or reckless.

Bankman-Fried’s control was seemingly heightened by the distance he constantly put between them, physically and emotionally. In another of the memos the two sent back and forth, Bankman-Fried laid out “Arguments Against” and “Arguments in Favor” of continuing their secret liaison, and made a startling confession that was also a rebuff:

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul … there’s a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don’t feel happiness.” He did indeed suffer from lifelong, heavily medicated depression, and often spoke about having to practice expressions of emotion. But this also amounts to a declaration that he didn’t love her. Meanwhile, on the “Arguments in Favor” side of the tally, Bankman-Fried wrote that “I really fucking like you,” as well as “I really like fucking you.”

On one level, the exquisite torture of their relationship reflects nothing stranger than two awkward twentysomethings learning hard lessons about love. But Sam’s reduction of the experience to a balance sheet of pros and cons reflects the broader contractual and emotion-quashing nature of relationships in the EA universe.

In some cases, this treatment of romance as an expected value calculation has led to poor treatment of women. A female EA named Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, writing in the wake of the FTX collapse, linked this specifically to the widespread practice of polyamory in the community. Based on personal experience, she warned that EA men “will persuade you to join polyamory using LessWrong [Rationalist] style Jedi mind tricks while they stand to benefit from the erosion of your boundaries.” This is worsened by the considerable power held disproportionately by men in the movement, including power over funding.

Caroline Ellison claimed to have experimented with polyamory as a corollary of her Effective Altruism. In the immediate wake of FTX’s collapse, the discovery that FTX and Alameda leadership lived together in the Orchid penthouse in the Bahamas invited speculation that they made up a “polycule” with entangled sexual relationships, but this doesn’t appear to have been quite correct.

The movement’s troubled sexual politics seem to be reflected in the demographic makeup of Effective Altruism: EAs surveyed in 2020 were 71% male (as well as 76% white). Women have reported feeling compelled to leave EA because of the prevalence of harassment and abuse, including in the form of men scheduling bogus one-on-one meetings, intended to welcome new members, to hit on female recruits. Though deeper issues were likely in play, a woman named Kathy Forth took her own life in 2018, and among the causes cited in a lengthy suicide note was distress caused by frequent unwelcome advances from men in the community, including several who were high-ranking.