The True Story Behind ‘The Altruists’ & What’s Added for Netflix Series
By Kate Hahn
Fri, October 9, 2026 at 8:00 PM UTC
Call them the Millennial version of Bonnie and Clyde. The Altruists, an eight-part drama premiering on November 19 on Netflix, tells the true story of dazzling math brains Sam Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle, House of Guinness) and Caroline Ellison (Julia Garner, Ozark). They began as an idealistic couple in their twenties who wanted to save the world by reshaping the financial system. Instead, they lost billions in investors’ and customers’ fortunes. In 2022, the grads of MIT and Stanford, respectively, were caught misappropriating funds that caused the collapse of their FTX crypto-currency exchange. Both ended up in jail.
"I genuinely believe that when Sam and Caroline first met, they were committed, earnest altruists," says executive producer Graham Moore. "They’d gone into finance to give away as much money as possible to charity. They were both vegans. They’d both really committed themselves to spending their lives trying to make the world a better place."
Netflix
Moore worked on the saga of the couple’s fall for four years. “I’ve basically given myself a master’s degree in Sam and Caroline,” Moore says. “In addition to poring over 3000 pages of court transcripts, plus every book about them that I could find.”