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Long before she became the CEO of crypto trading firm Alameda Research and a key figure in the Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) drama, Caroline Ellison was just a teenager trying to provide a little life advice and insight.
Ellison, the 29-year-old who was once linked romantically to SBF, lost her job in November when Alameda, the trading arm of SBF’s FTX exchange, unraveled as part of the FTX collapse. She later pled guilty to fraud and other offenses, telling a judge, “I am truly sorry for what I did. I knew that it was wrong.”
Now, a column that Ellison wrote in 2012 for the Newtonite, the newspaper of Newton North High School in Newton, Mass., has resurfaced online.
The piece was in the form of a letter in which Ellison, then a high-school senior, offered words of wisdom to her freshmen self.
In a nutshell, Ellison said not to take things too seriously, especially your schoolwork.
“You’ll learn a lot at North, but you’ll learn more outside school,” Ellison wrote.
She went on to suggest taking weekend classes or applying for academic summer programs as an alternative. Or just spending hours “on Wikipedia, clicking on one link after another until you feel slightly dazed, arming yourself with useless facts to slip into conversations.”
Ellison said it was okay to play hooky a bit: “Turn an assignment in late or don’t turn it in at all. Watch ‘New Girl’ online instead of doing your homework. Stay up late on Gchat and zone out in class the next day. It will never be the end of the world.”
Still, Ellison didn’t suggest becoming a complete goof-off. “Work hard and do things you can be proud of and feel good about, but don’t base your self-esteem on your outward accomplishments alone,” she wrote.
Ellison did go on to the highly competitive Stanford College and was known as a math whiz. According to a report in the Washington Post, she met SBF while interning at Jane Street Capital, a prominent quantitative-trading firm.
MarketWatch reached out to Ellison’s attorney for additional comment, but didn’t receive an immediate reply.
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