Netflix’s ‘The Altruists’ Turns Crypto’s Infamous Scandal Into A Gripping Drama

Anthony Boyle as Sam Bankman-Fried, and Julia Garner as Caroline Ellison in ‘The Altruists’ coming to Netflix.

Photo by Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix

Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison were two brilliant young people with big dreams: Get rich, make billions, and give most of it away to charity. The plan seemed simple. What happened next was anything but.

Netflix’s upcoming drama series The Altruists is one of those binge-watches that’s hard to stop once you start, so plan accordingly. Anthony Boyle stars as Sam alongside Julia Garner as Caroline, and both are fabulous in their roles, bringing depth and complexity to a young couple whose intelligence, ambition, and idealism ultimately took them down a very different path.

The eight-episode series, from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, premieres November 19 and follows the pair’s transformation from twentysomething idealists to Gen Z’s version of Bonnie and Clyde in the crypto world.

Their story, however, is far more than a tale of ambition, romance, and billions of dollars. In 2024, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan called their crimes potentially the “greatest financial fraud ever perpetrated in this country.”

They achieved extraordinary success, accumulating vast wealth with plans to give much of it away to charity. Instead, they became the architects of an $8 billion fraud that would bring down FTX, their global cryptocurrency empire, and ultimately land them both behind bars. Their goal was to remake the global financial system, but things didn’t go according to plan.

Created, written, and executive produced by Graham Moore, the series delves into the couple’s complicated love story, their meteoric rise in crypto, the crimes that followed, and their stunning fall from grace. Moore co-wrote the series with Jacqueline Hoyt, who also executive produced and serves as co-showrunner alongside Moore.

Moore and Hoyt were inspired by the New York Magazine articles by journalists Kevin T. Dugan and Jen Wieczner. Together, they tell the intimate story of two young people in love who make a series of morally conflicted decisions that began with good intentions.

Moore spoke about why he wanted to tell this story. He explained that he was fascinated by the couple from the beginning and wanted to go deeper than the headlines. When asked how he came into this project and why he wanted to tell this story, Moore said he was one of the millions of people worldwide who watched in November 2022 as FTX went from a $36 billion empire to a crime scene within 72 hours.

“I was glued to my screen, watching the collapse in real time. The great white knight of the finance world was being revealed to have potentially been a fraud? I was addicted,” he explained. “Then a producer friend texted me to ask if I wanted to create something about Sam, and my answer was instantaneous: ‘Absolutely not.’ Surely everybody on earth was going to try to tell a story this fascinating, right? No need for me to throw yet another hat in the ring.”

Then, added Moore, his friend told him that he was working with a team of reporters who were in the Bahamas at that very moment. He asked Moore if he would speak to them over the phone.

“Well, I couldn’t possibly say no to that, could I? When I started talking to those journalists, and then started developing my own sources within the FTX inner circle, what I found was a story much more personal, intimate, and heartbreaking than the one I was reading every day in the papers or on social media. It wasn’t just the story of Sam Bankman-Fried; it was the story of his on-again, off-again girlfriend Caroline.”

Bankman-Fried founded Alameda Research in 2017, before FTX existed. The criminal conduct underlying the FTX case occurred primarily between 2019 and November 2022.

Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019, and prosecutors alleged that the scheme to defraud its customers began that same year, involving the misappropriation of billions of dollars in customer funds.

From 2019 to 2022, FTX customer funds were improperly diverted to Alameda Research, where they were used for investments, loan repayments, political contributions, and other purposes. Ellison later testified that the practice continued and grew over time.

In 2022, the scheme unraveled as the crypto market deteriorated and FTX faced a massive liquidity crisis. On November 11, 2022, FTX and Alameda filed for bankruptcy, bringing the operation to an end.

Bankman-Fried and Ellison were ultimately held accountable for a years-long fraud. Ellison pleaded guilty in December 2022 and, after cooperating with prosecutors, was sentenced to two years in prison. Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 and sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024.

Moore has compassion for the couple at the center of the story. “The Altruists is the story of two people who I genuinely believe started out as earnest idealists, people who’d devoted their entire lives to making the world a better place. And by the end of their romantic relationship, they turned each other into people who ended up doing the exact opposite of what they set out to do. It’s not a show about crypto or finance. It’s about a relationship. And that was a story I just had to tell.”

Moore was fascinated by the global headlines and the couple at the center. “Every single thing I’ve ever made, I’ve made because I found some story I just got so obsessed with that I wanted to talk about it, dive into it, and work on it incessantly. I’ve been working on this series every single day for the last four years, and in that time, I developed many sources, both within FTX and without. I think I’ve read basically every word ever published about Sam, plus all the court documents (criminal and civil), plus social media histories, and Caroline’s old blog, which was a terrific volume of material.”

But, clarified Moore, it all started with the brilliant reporting from New York Magazine’s Dugan and Wieczner. “I worked with them throughout the process, from scripting through production and post. True story: I literally emailed them a fresh question yesterday. And they’ve both been wonderful about having conversations where I can say, “I know what you’re publishing about this – now can we just talk about what you think?”

When asked if he spoke with Sam and/or Caroline, Moore confirmed that he’s spoken with many of the real-life people connected to the story during the four years he’s been working on it. “I’ve spoken with many real people we depict on the show, as well as other folks from FTX’s inner circle who aren’t characters. To preserve the privacy of my own creative process, I can’t specify who I’ve talked to.”

He was also happy to have the opportunity to tell this story over eight episodes. “I think one of the reasons why I was so excited to tell this story in this form, as a piece of longform narrative television, is that there are so many moments in this story about which we’ll never be able to conclusively prove what happened. No one was recording Sam and Caroline in their intimate moments; the stories both have told since do not match up, to say the least. But in this art form, I had the ability to say, ‘What do I think might have happened here, even if I can’t prove it?’ I could make highly educated guesses, based on everything I knew, in order to tell Sam’s and Caroline’s stories responsibly, with the care they deserve.”

Moore concluded that the point of creating a series like this isn’t to say this is the final word on Sam and Caroline. “Just the opposite: It’s a conversation opener, not a conversation closer. I hope audiences leave the series wanting to know even more.”