Inside the Private Writings of Caroline Ellison, Star Witness in the FTX Case

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Three months before the cryptocurrency market imploded last year, Caroline Ellison, the 27-year-old chief executive of the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research, was racked with self-doubt. “I have been feeling pretty unhappy and overwhelmed with my job,” Ms. Ellison wrote in a Google document in February 2022. She added: “At the end of the day I can’t wait to go home and turn off my phone and have a drink and get away from it all.” Ms. Ellison had a lot on her mind. She did not think that she was well suited to running Alameda or was a particularly decisive leader, she wrote in another Google document. She was also going through a breakup with Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire entrepreneur who had founded Alameda and then FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. They had dated on and off, and Ms. Ellison worried about “making things weird” and “causing drama.” “It doesn’t really feel like there’s an end in sight,” she wrote in the February 2022 document. Now Ms. Ellison is poised to be a star witness at Mr. Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial, which is scheduled for Oct. 2.