Former FTX COO Constance Wang: Trailer is Disturbing
Former FTX Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO Constance Wang posted on Friday that watching the trailer for Netflix's upcoming FTX-themed series "The Altruists" made her physically nauseous, as she believes the portrayal in the show is severely inconsistent with her personal experiences.
Wang stated that she had been COO since before FTX was named, viewing it as her child, and was the last to leave the Bahamas after Sam Bankman-Fried was extradited. She claimed to have lost everything and took a long time to recover, thus having no intention of defending those responsible for the collapse.
She refuted the media narrative attributing the FTX collapse to Bahamian executives being addicted to partying, pointing out that the core team peaked at under 200 people (excluding subsidiaries), while exchanges of similar size often have thousands. Many worked 16 to 18 hours a day for over three years, with almost no sleep, and Sam Bankman-Fried was at his desk day and night.
Wang claimed that during her time working with Caroline Ellison, she never saw her as aggressive as depicted in the trailer; the real Ellison is quiet, gentle, and often lost in thought. Most employees only learned of her relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried after the bankruptcy, and Wang herself had never seen the latter engage in physical affection.
Wang noted that the FTX collapse destroyed many lives, including those of employees, and criticized Netflix for turning it into a love story, calling it shameful. The series consists of 8 episodes and will premiere on Netflix on November 19, with Julia Garner playing Ellison, Anthony Boyle as Bankman-Fried, and Madison Hu portraying Wang herself.
The series is produced by Higher Ground and others, and the official logline describes it as a toxic love story, stating that the two attempted to reshape the financial system before being accused of misappropriating about $800 million. Wang co-founded the trading platform Pacifica in early 2025.
The series packages complex fund misappropriation as a love narrative to attract subscriptions and topic traffic, with former employees publicly questioning the potential impact on viewers' understanding of the events, benefiting content platforms while putting pressure on the accuracy of historical narratives and the restoration of industry trust.
Source: Public Information
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Constance Wang previously served as a risk and compliance analyst at Credit Suisse in Singapore, briefly joined Huobi, and became COO of FTX in 2019 when it was still unnamed, later rising to Co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets in early 2022. She was not criminally charged after the collapse and joined Sino Global Capital in 2023, co-founding Pacifica in 2025.
Her path shifted from traditional investment banking risk control to core operations at a crypto exchange, entering venture capital after the collapse to establish a new platform, focusing resources on transforming early execution experience into operational and compliance frameworks for new trading infrastructure. Her public criticism targets the dramatization of internal work conditions and relationships by streaming media, rather than defending the main perpetrators.
Similar cases can be seen in responses from former parties involved in other financial scandals adapted into film and television, where some corporate executives publicly point out discrepancies between narratives and actual internal situations before or after the release of documentaries or series. The current content industry is in an expansion phase of transforming crypto financial events into subscription-based love or crime series, while former parties attempt to contest the definition of the events.
Essentially, this represents a transfer of pricing power: streaming media compresses fund misappropriation and governance failures into personal relationships and love frameworks, gaining narrative pricing power and audience attention. The mechanism involves dramatization lowering the understanding threshold to expand paying users, while the original operators compete for factual interpretation rights through specific work hours, team size, and interpersonal observations, ultimately influencing public perception of client fund segregation and executive accountability.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Love is packaging, work hours are facts
A narrative supported by 200 people is harder to film than one by thousands
Who controls the trailer, who takes attention first