Netflix released the official trailer for “The Altruists” on Thursday, and it opens on a bet. The eight-episode limited series follows Sam Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle) and Caroline Ellison (Julia Garner) through the rise and collapse of FTX, and all eight episodes arrive on November 19th. Netflix’s logline calls them “two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists who tried to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye.” The rest of that sentence is the part everyone already knows: they were accused of stealing $8 billion and became Gen Z’s own Bonnie and Clyde. It is a story with a known ending, and the trailer does not pretend otherwise.
Graham Moore created the series and runs it with co-showrunner Jacqueline Hoyt. Moore won an Oscar for writing “The Imitation Game”, and he directed the sixth episode himself. James Ponsoldt directed the premiere, while Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Mairzee Almas and Silver Tree handled two episodes each. The series is not adapted from a book but draws on reporting by Kevin T. Dugan and Jen Wieczner for New York Magazine. Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground is among the producers. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the trailer and for the real FTX case.
It is a story with a known ending, and the trailer does not pretend otherwise.”
The first scene sets the terms. Sam crosses a glass atrium in a red plaid shirt and sits down across from Caroline, who answers his “Hey. I’m Sam” with her first name. She sets up a brain teaser in which each player bets a percentage of a stack of red poker chips. A hand shoves the whole stack into the middle of the table, and Sam warns her, “You could lose everything.” Caroline answers over a run of close-ups that going all in every time “is the mathematically optimal strategy.” The trailer hands its thesis to her and not to him, and that choice frames everything that follows.
Then comes the romance. In a dark pub, Sam and a friend look up at Caroline on a balcony as a voice says, “That’s her. That’s the girl.” The next shot is an Effective Altruism mixer, with a banner over the room and Sam in a blue T-shirt and a name tag. The pitch comes later, in bed over a laptop: “What if we built our own cryptocurrency business? We could call it FTX.” The trailer then jumps to Sam on a ferry in Hong Kong’s harbor with a phone to his ear. That detail is accurate, since FTX started out in Hong Kong in 2019 and moved its headquarters to the Bahamas in 2021.
The money arrives fast. A card reading “A Netflix Limited Series” sits over an overhead shot of a trading floor, and someone calls crypto “the Wild West” where whoever gets there first “has the opportunity to do good.” The phrase “a crypto fund that earns to give” plays over an architectural model of a palm-lined campus as Caroline peers over its tiny roofs. Earning to give is the effective altruism idea of getting rich in order to give the money away, and Bankman-Fried embraced it publicly. Then comes the payoff line: “We are making a million dollars a day.”
The middle stretch is pure excess. There is a laser-lit rave with a leaderboard on the big screen and a private jet on a palm-lined runway. A desk clock reads 4:00 AM as the two of them embrace in an empty office. A copy of Fortune sits on a desk with Sam’s face on the cover. Its partly legible cover line asks whether he is the next Warren Buffett, and that one is real. Fortune put Bankman-Fried on its cover under those words in 2022, a few months before FTX fell.
Then the warnings start. Someone tells Caroline that she and Sam are “the two smartest people I’ve ever met” but adds, “sometimes I can’t fathom how you can both be so stupid.” The cuts speed up with title cards reading “All In” and “Every Time” between shots. One voice insists, “We have to invest responsibly,” and another answers, “We go all in, or I’m out.” Over a board of clear crystal pieces comes the ugliest line in the trailer: “Lying isn’t bad for a good cause.” A napkin sketch follows, with a loop of arrows running from FTX to FTT to Alameda to loans and back again.
That napkin is the whole case in one drawing. FTT was the token FTX issued, and Alameda was Bankman-Fried’s trading firm. On November 2nd, 2022, the crypto news site CoinDesk published a version of Alameda’s balance sheet and customers rushed to pull their money out. Within days the value of Alameda’s FTX-linked tokens had collapsed, and on November 11th FTX filed for bankruptcy. In the trailer, the newsroom they fear is the Wall Street Journal. In real life the first crack came from a crypto trade site.
The last thirty seconds are the fall. Sam shouts “You were the one who did it!” at Caroline on a balcony, and over a food court scene someone pleads, “Dude, you gotta promise me you won’t say anything, okay?” A man stares at a screen of account numbers with the word “liability” reflected in blue across his face. Then a voice says it plainly: “Sam and Caroline stole eight billion dollars from customers.” The trailer closes on the couple in the dark, with Caroline saying “I don’t know who I can trust” and Sam answering “You trust me, right?”
None of this is in doubt in court. Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In June a federal appeals court upheld both the conviction and the sentence. Ellison pleaded guilty in December 2022 and testified at his trial that he directed her to commit the crimes. She was sentenced to two years in September 2024 and was released this January.
Moore’s framing is the real risk here. He told Netflix he believes both of them were “deeply committed altruists from day one” who talked each other into “a number of terrible crimes” with “the very best of intentions.” That is a generous reading of two people who took customer money. It can work as drama, because good intentions going bad make a better story than plain greed. But the show has to keep the customers in the frame, and the trailer mostly does not. The one line that names them comes in the final half minute.
Boyle and Garner are the reason to watch. Garner won three Emmys for “Ozark”, and Boyle has the curls and the oversized T-shirts down. Moore told Netflix he did not want impressions from either of them. Garner had only two recordings of Ellison to study, while Boyle had a mountain of video, audio and TikToks. That gap matters, because Sam is a public figure most viewers have already seen and Caroline is a character Garner had to build almost from scratch. Our bet is that her half of the show ends up as the better half.
The supporting cast fills in the inner circle. Alex Lawther plays Sam Trabucco, who shared the top job at Alameda with Ellison. Karan Soni plays Nishad Singh, Eugene Young plays Gary Wang and Matt Rife plays Ryan Salame. Paul Reiser and Robin Weigert play Sam’s parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. Jack Greenlees plays Will MacAskill, the philosopher who helped found the effective altruism movement.
The trailer gets one big thing right. It treats the all in bet as the engine of the story and not as a gimmick. The open question is whether eight episodes can turn two people at the center of an $8 billion hole into characters worth following, and we find out on November 19th.
What Do You Think? Are Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle the right pair to play Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried? Should a drama about FTX ask viewers to see its leads as idealists who lost their way? And will you be watching all eight episodes on November 19th?
See you on the next binge!
