On Nov. 8, 2022, as the FTX crisis unfolded, sister trading firm Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison gathered around fifteen employees for an all-hands meeting in the Hong Kong office. It was around 11 p.m. local time, about 24 hours after an announcement by Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX's CEO at the time, that he would be selling the company to Binance and its CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, his longtime rival. Around ten to fifteen more employees joined the meeting via teleconference in the Bahamas, where it was 10 a.m. 

In the meeting, seemingly unburdened by the prospect of CZ's bailout, Ellison told her employees exactly what, in her view, went wrong: Alameda had borrowed large amounts of capital via open-term loans from third-party lenders in order to buy out Binance's original equity …