Ex-FTX COO Constance Wang Says Netflix's 'The Altruists' Trailer Misrepresents FTX. Series Premieres Nov. 19

Constance Wang was inside FTX when it fell. Now she says Netflix's version of the story is fiction dressed up as a cautionary tale.

In an Oct. 9 post on X, Wang reacted to the trailer for The Altruists, an eight-episode limited series set to premiere on Netflix Nov. 19. "Watching it made me physically throw up," she wrote.

What Wang says the trailer gets wrong

Wang joined FTX in early 2019 and later became chief operating officer, then co-CEO in the exchange's final months. She says the company she worked for looked nothing like the one on screen.

"The media loves the story that FTX blew up because we were all partying in the Bahamas, but the place I worked looked nothing like that," she wrote.

She says FTX had fewer than 200 employees, many working 16- to 18-hour days with "barely" any time to sleep.

She also disputes the romance at the center of the show. Netflix bills it as "a toxic love story inspired by a real fraud." Wang says most staff had no idea Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison were dating until they read about it after the bankruptcy.

In an interview with the New York Post, she described a group chat with close colleagues after the news broke. "I was like, 'Do you guys know this?' They were like, 'No. We thought you knew?'"

On Ellison, she said she never saw the aggression shown in the trailer. "She's quiet and mild, and often lost in her own thoughts." On Bankman-Fried, she said she never saw him "so much as put an arm around anyone."

Wang is also a character. Madison Hu plays her, and Wang says no one consulted her. She told the Post she stopped the trailer after about 40 seconds. In a separate Chain Reaction discussion published Oct. 19, she put the figure at about 30.

The cast, the producers, the premiere

Anthony Boyle plays Bankman-Fried. Julia Garner plays Ellison. The series is produced by Higher Ground, the company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama.

Graham Moore, the series creator, has said the production was meant to build three-dimensional characters rather than exact impersonations of the real people. The producers have answered complaints about accuracy with that point. Wang's objections are to the trailer, a two-minute promo. The finished episodes have not aired.

Her account is also one perspective from inside the company. The Post noted that around 10 people at the center of the operation lived in the Bahamas with Bankman-Fried and Ellison. Wang says she attended a couple of the group's parties and that the effective altruism crowd was not for her. Whether the wider staff knew about the relationship is something only the people there can say.

What nobody disputes

Wang is not defending the people at the top. "I have zero interest in defending the people who caused this," she wrote.

The core facts are settled in court. FTX's bankruptcy exposed a shortfall of roughly $8 billion to $9 billion in customer funds tied to Alameda Research's use of the money. A jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven fraud and conspiracy counts in November 2023. He is serving 25 years. Ellison pleaded guilty, testified against him and received a two-year sentence in September 2024.

Wang says the collapse was not a romance. She describes the November 2022 crisis as a scramble. The exchange faced about $6 billion in withdrawals over 72 hours after Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced plans to sell FTX's token, FTT. That day she was assigned to reassure the largest customers. Only in an overnight meeting, she says, did she first see a spreadsheet showing a gap of about $8 billion.

She also says her personal FTX holdings once topped $1 billion and fell to about $80,000. That figure is her own statement.

Crypto Briefing reports she was the subject of a year-long Justice Department investigation and was never charged.

Wang after FTX

Wang co-founded Pacifica, a crypto trading platform, in early 2025. It focuses on perpetual futures built on Solana infrastructure. Pacifica reported $10 billion in monthly trading volume in October 2026.

She says the company has raised no outside money because some institutional investors faced compliance limits on dealing with former FTX personnel while bankruptcy proceedings continued. Pacifica's technical documentation describes a project begun in January 2025 with a testnet within three months and a mainnet within six.

That gives her a business reason to talk, and her critics are free to weigh it. Her account of FTX's culture remains hers alone until viewers judge the show against it.

What comes next

The series lands Nov. 19. Still unknown is how much of the $8 billion customer-fund hole the eight episodes actually spend time on, and how much goes to the romance Wang calls laughable. Viewers will have the finished product in three weeks.