FTX: Netflix's 'The Altruists' Turns an $8B Collapse Into a Love Story, and Its Former COO Is Sick

On 9 October 2026, the day after Netflix released the trailer for its FTX drama, the woman who ran the exchange's day-to-day operations posted her review on X. Constance Wang, FTX's chief operating officer, said that "watching it made me physically throw up". Her verdict on the company the trailer shows: "the place I worked looked nothing like that".

The series is The Altruists, an eight-episode limited drama that premieres worldwide on Netflix on 19 November 2026. Anthony Boyle plays Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, and Julia Garner plays Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda Research, the trading firm that sat beside it. Netflix's own synopsis calls the show "a toxic love story inspired by a real fraud". The trailer drew 4.2 million views in its first seven hours, according to The Defiant.

The fraud it is inspired by took about $8 billion of customers' money. FTX was a crypto exchange, a business that works like an online stockbroker: customers deposit money, buy and sell digital coins, and trust the firm to hold their balances. In November 2022 those customers asked for their money back and it was not there. Bankman-Fried is serving 25 years in a federal prison.

What Netflix is making

The Altruists was created by Graham Moore, who won an Oscar for writing The Imitation Game, and is co-run by Jacqueline Hoyt. According to What's on Netflix, it is based on reporting for New York Magazine by Kevin T. Dugan and Jen Wieczner. Higher Ground, the production company of Barack and Michelle Obama, is among the executive producers, as is Garner herself. James Ponsoldt, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Mairzee Almas, Silver Tree and Moore direct the episodes.

©Photos: Gage Skidmore (Boyle) and Harald Krichel (Garner), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The cast is built around the real FTX inner circle. Alex Lawther plays Sam Trabucco, Ellison's former co-chief executive at Alameda. Karan Soni plays Nishad Singh, FTX's head of engineering. Eugene Young plays Gary Wang, the co-founder who wrote much of FTX's code. Matt Rife, the stand-up comedian, plays Ryan Salame, an FTX executive who went to prison for illegal political donations. Madison Hu plays Constance Wang. Paul Reiser and Robin Weigert play Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, Bankman-Fried's parents, both law professors at Stanford.

Netflix's official logline describes "two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists who tried to remake the global financial system" before they "were accused of stealing $8 billion and became Gen Z's own Bonnie & Clyde". Moore, in remarks quoted by Gizmodo, went further: "I genuinely believe that both Sam and Caroline were deeply committed altruists from day one." In his telling, the pair, "with the very best of intentions, talked each other and themselves into committing a number of terrible crimes."

The title points at effective altruism, a philosophy popular in Silicon Valley that urges people to earn as much as possible and give it to the most useful causes. Bankman-Fried said for years that this was why he was getting rich.

The trailer leans into the romance and the bravado. Garner's Ellison says that "going all-in is the only mathematically optimal strategy". Boyle's Bankman-Fried talks about wanting to "make a difference", and also says: "There's no such thing as criminals. There's only people that get caught." The AV Club described the mood as the "gung-ho amorality" of tech disruptors.

What actually happened

FTX was founded in 2019 and by early 2022 was valued at $32 billion. Its customers believed their deposits sat safely in their accounts, the way shares sit in a brokerage account. They did not. Bankman-Fried had customer money moved to Alameda, which spent it on trading, venture investments, property in the Bahamas and political donations.

In early November 2022 the crypto news site CoinDesk reported that much of Alameda's balance sheet was made up of FTT, a token FTX had created itself, roughly like a company propping up its accounts with its own scrip. Customers rushed for the exit, the same way depositors run on a bank. FTX could not pay. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 11 November 2022, and Bankman-Fried resigned the same day. He was arrested in the Bahamas in December 2022 and extradited to New York.

Ellison, Gary Wang and Singh pleaded guilty and testified against him. Ellison told the jury that Bankman-Fried directed her to take customer money, and also described their on-off relationship. On 2 November 2023 a jury convicted him on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. On 28 March 2024 Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced him to 25 years and ordered him to forfeit $11 billion.

Ellison was sentenced to two years in September 2024. She was moved to a halfway house in New York in October 2025 and was released on 22 January 2026, about 440 days into the term, according to Cointelegraph. Wang and Singh received no prison time. Salame was sentenced to seven and a half years.

The insider who was there

Constance Wang should not be confused with Gary Wang, the co-founder who pleaded guilty. She was never charged with anything. She joined as chief operating officer in 2019, before FTX was even called FTX, and was co-chief executive in the exchange's final months. "It was my baby," she wrote. She said she "was the last one out of the Bahamas after Sam got extradited" and "lost everything I had on it".

Her objections go to the show's premise. FTX, she said, had fewer than 200 employees working 16 to 18 hour days with "barely" any time to sleep, not a party. She said that "most of us didn't even know she and Sam were dating until we read about it after the bankruptcy". And she rejected the trailer's version of Ellison: "I worked with Caroline and never once saw her get aggressive like she does in this trailer. She's quiet and mild, and often lost in her own thoughts."

Her final line was the one that travelled: "FTX's collapse ruined so many people's lives, including ours, and Netflix decided to make it a love story. Shame on you." Wang co-founded a trading platform called Pacifica in early 2025.

The Defiant reported that the most-shared replies from crypto accounts went after the casting and the accuracy. No public comment on the trailer from Bankman-Fried or Ellison had been reported by 10 October.

Fact and drama

Some of what the trailer sells is on the court record. Bankman-Fried and Ellison did have a relationship; she described it under oath. Bankman-Fried did talk endlessly about effective altruism, and Ellison testified that he was willing to take bets most people would call reckless. The $8 billion figure matches what prosecutors proved.

The "idealists from day one" reading is Moore's interpretation, and the courts have not treated intentions kindly. Upholding the conviction on 12 June 2026, Judge Barrington Parker wrote that FTX customers "were defrauded as soon as Bankman-Fried transferred their money to Alameda regardless of how strongly he believed he might later return the money". Good intentions, in the court's view, were not a defence.

Bankman-Fried is still fighting. On 10 September 2026 his lawyers, led by the Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher, asked the US Supreme Court to hear his case, arguing that he was barred from showing the jury that FTX had enough assets to repay everyone. Separately, the Justice Department's website lists an application from him for a pardon from President Donald Trump, a "pardon after completion of sentence" that would restore rights such as voting without erasing the conviction. Trump told The New York Times in January 2026 that he would not pardon him.

The repayment argument is the one the show will have to handle carefully. The FTX bankruptcy estate, run by John J. Ray III, has paid about $10 billion back to creditors across five distributions, the latest on 31 July 2026, and most customers have received 119% or more of their claims. But claims were valued in dollars on the day of the bankruptcy, when bitcoin was worth about $17,000. Bitcoin traded above $80,000 in late September 2026. A customer who held one bitcoin on FTX got back a fraction of what that bitcoin is now worth. The money came back. The coins did not.