Oct. 8, 2026
If you thought Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Altman were the only tech moguls getting roasted on screen this fall, then you missed a big one: Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange known as FTX. The difference here is that Bankman-Fried is getting his biopic turn on the firing line in the form of a TV miniseries instead of as a film. The eight-episode series is coming from Netflix, and it’s called The Altruists.
The series stars Anthony Boyle (Tolkien, House of Guinness) as Bankman-Fried and Julia Garner (Ozark, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) as Caroline Ellison. The trailer for the series sets up the story as a weird and dark love story between Bankman-Fried and Ellison (the former CEO of Alameda Research). There’s no getting around this, so I’ll just state it up front: this trailer almost looks like a Saturday Night Live parody skit, just with a bigger budget. It’s not necessarily the timeliness of the subject matter, rather, it’s the way Bankman-Fried and Ellison are portrayed. They gave Garner a dental prosthetic that gives the character an almost slapstick overbite. It’s an effective and dramatic, though some would say unkind, slap at the real-life Ellison.
🙋🏻♂️🤖 MAN AND ROBOTS lands in your inbox every Friday: AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. Get it free →
Similarly, the hairpieces and the wardrobes of the two lead actors both look like the producers are poking fun at the real-life individuals in the way that SNL might. To be fair, Bankman-Fried and Ellison weren’t known for being fashionistas with runway model profiles. And during the trial, it was revealed that, despite his disheveled look, Bankman-Fried was hyper-focused on how he appeared to the public. But when most of the other aforementioned tech elites are getting biopics that temper the harsh (albeit directionally true) business depictions with visually appealing actors and styling, it stands out that these crypto convicts are getting no mercy from the showrunners of The Altruists.
The creator of the series is Graham Moore, the Oscar-winning writer of The Imitation Game, the 2014 Alan Turing biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange). Given that pedigree, we can expect a strong script, but the satirical undertones are still a bit of a surprise. Crypto insiders might also be interested to know that Binance founder CZ (Changpeng Zhao) makes an appearance, played by Terry Chen (The Expanse, House of Cards).
Currently, Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison after being convicted of fraud and ordered to forfeit $11 billion (FTX was once worth $32 billion). Ellison, who was released in January after serving 14 months in federal custody, now works for a nonprofit organization called Manifund, which was created by the prediction market startup Manifold. Notably, Manifund counted FTX and Alameda Research among its early backers, and the nonprofit received a half-million-dollar grant from FTX in 2022, so Ellison is back swimming in friendly business waters following her prison stint.
For the uninitiated, the title of the series, The Altruists, is a nod to the effective altruism (EA) movement that Bankman-Fried was a part of. Broadly, EA is framed as being focused on making as much money as possible, as well as courting mega donors, all presumably in service of longtermism and the “moral math” of leveraging logic over emotion to help humanity.
“Young, idealistic and suddenly worth billions, they tried to do good — but unleashed the worst in each other. A toxic love story inspired by a real fraud,” the trailer’s description reads. The Altruists hits Netflix on November 19.
So far, the recent concern that Universal might pull out of the international release of the film (due to what some allege is behind-the-scenes pressure) hasn’t come to pass. As for the U.S. release of the film, it will hit theaters on Oct. 9.
Cover: A scene from ‘The Altruists’ via Netflix/YouTube
