Last year, as cryptocurrency company FTX and sister trading firm Alameda Research were melting down, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison held an all-hands meeting and told staff that Alameda had taken customer deposits from FTX and could not pay them back. When asked in the meeting by an employee whose idea it had been to use customer funds, “Sam, I guess” was Ellison’s answer.
Today, at the end of Ellison’s testimony during the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF for short, prosecutor Danielle Sassoon asked why she had qualified her answer. The “I guess,” explained Ellison, was just a vocal tic. It wasn’t a question. It had been Bankman-Fried’s idea the