Most FTX employees had no idea that Sam Bankman-Fried and former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison were dating until they read about it after the bankruptcy, according to former co-CEO Constance Wang, who said so in a post on X on Friday. Her remarks were a response to the trailer for Netflix's upcoming FTX series, "The Altruists," which is set to premiere while the legal fallout from the exchange's November 2022 collapse is still being contested in court.

"FTX's collapse ruined so many people's lives, including ours, and Netflix decided to make it a love story," Wang wrote. "Shame on you."

Wang's account of life inside FTX

Wang said she ran FTX's operations as chief operating officer from early 2019, before the exchange even had a name, and took over as co-CEO in the final months before its collapse in November 2022.

She also pushed back on the widely circulated narrative that FTX staff were partying in the Bahamas as the exchange unraveled. Fewer than 200 people worked at the company, she said, and many put in 16- to 18-hour days on little sleep. She said she never saw Bankman-Fried put an arm around anyone, and never saw Ellison display the aggression depicted in the trailer, recalling instead a quiet, mild-mannered colleague who was often lost in thought.

Wang said she was the last person to depart the Bahamas after Bankman-Fried was extradited and that she lost everything she had with the company. She wrote that many people messaged her about the trailer and that watching it made her throw up. At the same time, she said she has no interest in defending the people who caused the collapse. Her account amounts to an on-the-record rebuttal from inside the company ahead of the show's debut, sharpening a dispute over how the collapse and the people at its center should be portrayed.

The series and the legal aftermath

"The Altruists" is an eight-episode series that will debut on Netflix on November 19. Julia Garner plays Ellison and Anthony Boyle plays Bankman-Fried. Wang is also a character in the show, played by Madison Hu, in a cast Netflix confirmed alongside the trailer on October 8. Netflix has described the series as "a toxic love story inspired by a real fraud." According to Cryptopolitan, showrunner Graham Moore described the duo as altruists who talked each other into crime. Garner, for her part, had only two recordings of Ellison to examine. The premiere will put a dramatized version of events in front of a mainstream audience even as the documented legal record continues to develop.

Wang's LinkedIn profile shows she co-founded Pacifica, a trading venue, in early 2025.

Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all seven counts by a jury in November 2023 and is serving a 25-year sentence. The Second Circuit affirmed the conviction on June 12. In September, he took the case to the Supreme Court, seeking review of the conviction and an $11 billion forfeiture order. He still denies fraud and claimed in a June prison phone interview that customers had been repaid about 170% of their deposits.

Ellison pled guilty and testified that she and Bankman-Fried used Alameda to deploy billions of dollars taken from FTX customers. She received a two-year sentence, and Cryptopolitan reported that she spent more than a year in prison before being placed in community confinement.

With the series arriving on November 19 and the Supreme Court still weighing whether to take up Bankman-Fried's petition, the dramatized and legal versions of the FTX story each have a near-term milestone ahead.