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Annals of Great Friday-at-6:00PM Announcements: "Caroline Ellison Has Joined Manifund."
For those needing a refresher, Caroline Ellison was Sam Bankman-Fried's lieutenant in charge at Alameda Research, the hedge fund he used to embezzle FTX customer funds. She pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Manifund is an effective altruism grantmaking and infrastructure provider spun-off from Manifold Markets.
I think this is definitive evidence that no, the Effective Altruism community did not properly internalize the lessons from the FTX crisis. This is going to get a lot of bad press, and it will be easy to criticize the decision as bad optics, but this is not simply "bad optics". Aella's Twitter feed is bad optics. This is bad practice. It is bad practice to hire people with bad decisionmaking records for decisionmaking roles. It is bad practice to establish a norm of soft-landings for people culpable in major scandals.
I had sort of expected Caroline to remain a semi-public figure associated with EA/AI/rationalism after her release from prison, but I didn't expect her to get hired for a financial infrastructure job. She should be blogging for pennies on Substack or working in the bednet mines.
I had actually interviewed for a job with SBF and realized I was simultaneously interviewing for a job at three companies at once: Alameda, FTX and some crypto product. I had a decade of quant finance experience at that point and I was talking to a bunch of kids with like, 2. I won't say I predicted they were up to the shenanigans they were but that they had people at the top stepping between companies so casually struck me as conflicted and I didn't continue. These kids felt in over their head and I didn't want to be part of the shit show.
Anyway, the optics are bad but if you ignore them Ellison is probably a decent employee. She did pass a Jane Street interview and left them to pursue Alameda; she would probably be good at most technical jobs. She probably comes cheap given how radioactive she is otherwise. On paper, if you ignore the optics, she's probably a bargain.
Did she fuck up? Oh sure. She should have done more to pump the brakes on bad record keeping practices but that's incompatible with the move fast break things model SBF was pushing. The fact that they had a romantic relationship would also compromise her.
Red flags abounds but that's not something I expect most people to navigate well. Iln most industries what she did doesn't even matter but in quant finance you need a large compliance team and you need to check with them every time you take a shit. I am not surprised they didn't grow this out in 18 months and racked up process crimes left and right because building cool shit was more fun than meeting with the compliance team[1]
I'm looking forward to more drama though. Austin doesn't strike me as a lunatic but the way he writes about her reeks a bit romantic. Oh no!
Someone may be a very competent carpenter but if they also have a history of burning down houses then it’s a bad idea to hire them to build a house.
In this case the carpenter decided to also be an electrician and plumber and mason and the house burned down because her psycho boyfriend, who owned the house, was tapping the gas line for his craft brewery down the street.
It's probably fine if she sticks to carpentry.
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