> Ellison’s testimony claims that the fraud between FTX and Alameda took place as early as 2019 and Trabucco joined Alameda the same year. In crypto circles, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate is suspected of being aware of financial misconduct if he was the co-CEO for that long and if Ellison’s story is accurate.
While I personally don’t think—now—that SBF in retrospect likely posed this kind of risk, the scale of the grift is the kind of thing where someone pulling it off is quite likely to have motive and means to cause quite heinous outcomes to perceived threats.
A quiet but apparently amicable distancing may be the most someone feels safe doing.
More like, "wait, this is getting too risky from a personal legal/criminal standpoint". If he knew something was off and he cared about someone other than himself, he should have become a whistleblower.
It is surely entirely possible to get stuck in the no-man's land where you know something is seriously wrong but you cannot prove it to the level of qualifying for the kind of whistleblower protections you need to survive the process.
In this situation, blowing the whistle and failing to be heard is one outcome. Blowing the whistle and having the consensus in a light-touch regulatory system be that you're doing so without cause or worse maliciously is another.
Blowing the whistle, being unable to prove it and being sued into oblivion is yet another. If you are sued into oblivion by a crook, you tend not to get your money back when they are finally caught.
My own feeling is that in such a situation I would walk away, refuse to give interviews, pointedly not take a job for a while, talk to a lawyer in a way that is recorded, and likely brief an appropriate journalist off the record.
I’m wondering if he did and if he is going to be the prosecution star witness walking down the aisle the first day of the trial. It’s too weird that there is no mention I can find anywhere of a warrant for his arrest etc. They’ve gone after everyone else like Gary Wang and Nishad Singh and of course Caroline.
Sometimes you get pulled in, little by little, then you wake up and realise what sort of situation you're in.
And if he was legitimately thinking "wait, this is wrong"...