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Notes -
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 wonder if she is benefitting from everyone's curiosity about whether that grippy really is worth throwing away a $16 billion fortune.
What makes you think that Caroline Ellison's pussy had anything to do with the collapse of FTX?
It's a long running joke, someone else posted the copypasta.
She clearly was not qualified to be CEO of Almeda Research, which as best I can tell was the portion that failed first. There were reports coincident with the failure that linked Ellison and Bankman-Fried romantically. So, its not unreasonable to believe that she got the position based on her relationship rather than her qualifications
Going by the book, the entire personnel list and turnover of same in the intertwined entities was nuts. People were joining, moving around, resigning, being replaced, by the new time. Ellison ended up as CEO of Alameda more or less as "the only person still around" and she was pushed into a position that she was not prepared or suited for, but Sam convinced her.
Sam seems to have been able to convince a lot of people to trust him and do this crazy thing, and the crazy thing worked out, so next time he proposed something crazy people's barriers were lowered over "well he was right last time". Also the EA jargon he was spouting was believed in by a lot of the people, and when you have a cult going on that is convinced it's making huge money by being smarter than the normies and using that money to save the world, nobody inside wants to rock the boat by pointing out the Emperor has no clothes.
The Sequoia Capital article on it all (right before it went belly-up) is fantastic for the kind of moondust he was selling and how otherwise (you would imagine) smart people disbursing funding who should have been a lot more cynical just bought it by the bushel.
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