Caroline Ellison said she grew up 'exposed to a lot of economics.' Here's everything we know about her MIT economist parents.

Caroline Ellison pleaded guilty to wire and securities fraud

Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of the crypto trading firm Alameda Research, has become entwined in the criminal proceedings related to FTX's collapse.

Ellison pleaded guilty to seven charges of wire and securities fraud earlier this month. The New York Times reported that she told a district judge she was "truly sorry" for what she did and that she "knew it was wrong."

Ellison was released on $250,000 bail.

US federal prosecutors have accused Ellison of being involved in Sam Bankman-Fried's alleged scheme to defraud FTX customers and misappropriate their funds, with some of the money being used to prop up Alameda Research.

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Ellison of being an "active participant" in the scheme and alleged that she manipulated the price of FTT, FTX's in-house token, by purchasing large quantities on the open market.

The agency said this inflated the valuation of Alameda Research's FTT holdings and caused the value of collateral on Alameda's balance sheet to be overstated, misleading investors. It also said that Ellison was aware that Bankman-Fried made "false and misleading" statements to FTX investors.

Compared to Bankman-Fried – who Ellison once dated – the former Alameda CEO has largely stayed clear of the limelight, instead becoming notorious for her Tumblr account where she wrote about topics like crypto and polyamory. Here's everything we know about her parents, who are both economists at MIT.

Her father heads MIT's economics department, wrote math textbooks for kids, and used to work with Gary Gensler

Her mother was a budding student athlete, bought Caroline a book about Genghis Khan when she was a child, and is a senior economics lecturer at MIT

Caroline and her sisters were 'exposed to a lot of economics' from a young age

Because of her parents, Ellison, who has two younger sisters, grew up surrounded by numbers.

"We definitely got exposed to a lot of economics," Ellison told Forbes in October 2021.

"From an early age my parents taught me things like the difference between correlation and causation, and how to interpret observational vs. randomized studies," she wrote on Tumblr.

Ellison learnt about Bayesian statistics before middle school and once gave her father an economics study analyzing stuffed animal prices at Toys 'R' Us rather than a birthday card, Forbes reported.

Caroline's parents were proud of her success at school. She wrote on Tumblr that when she told them she was the top-performing girl in math competitions at school, her parents would take her out for dinner to celebrate.

Caroline used to ask her father to do her taxes

For part of her childhood, the Ellison family lived in a house owned by Antonin Scalia.

Caroline wrote on her Tumblr account that Scalia invited the family to visit him at the Supreme Court and said he'd reserve seats for them to watch a session, "which we actually took him up on."

Caroline wrote on Tumblr that she supports "laissez-faire parenting." She also wrote that from a "pretty young age," when her mom was away, her dad let her cook food for the family. "The responsibility made me feel really cool and grown-up," she wrote. She started drinking red wine and seltzer with dinner when she was in high school, saying it was what both her parents did, she also wrote.

Caroline still turned to her parents for support as she grew up.

"I call my dad when I'm having problems with my computer or it's April and I realize I haven't done my taxes yet and want someone to do them for me," she wrote on Tumblr in 2016.