I wonder how many of the nine women on the jury are doing the same. Ellison was the head of Alameda Research, the aforementioned hedge fund, during the implosion of it and FTX.
Today, that took the form of discussing a damning spreadsheet β one she prepared for her ex and boss Sam Bankman-Fried, now the defendant in a criminal fraud trial. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been found guilty on seven counts including charges of wire fraud. But he managed to shake the rust off long enough to make Wang sound less reliable, drowning the jury in confusing technicalities.
Everdell tried to undermine this claim by talking about the spot margin program , which let users lend each other assets for margin trading. In those cases, it was possible to have a negative balance in a specific coin.
It was not, however, possible for those accounts to avoid liquidation, as Wang testified Alameda could do β or to have an overall negative balance. I got the gist, though, and I bet the jury did, too β probably the strongest work the defense has done so far.
But by the end of the day, that all seemed like a sideshow. When the prosecution asked her to identify Bankman-Fried, she had trouble finding him and gazed around the courtroom for more than 20 seconds β apparently he was incognito with his new haircut.
