Netflix Sets November Release for 'The Altruists,' Its Sam Bankman-Fried Series Starring Julia Garner
Netflix has set a November 19 release date for The Altruists, an eight-episode drama inspired by the rise and fall of FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried and his girlfriend Caroline Ellison. Alongside the date, the platform released the first official photos from the series (Variety, 13 August 2026).
Julia Garner stars as Caroline Ellison, and Anthony Boyle plays Sam Bankman-Fried. The supporting cast includes Alex Lawther, Karan Soni, Naomi Okada, Madison Hu, Matt Rife and Eugene Young (Variety).
The series is created by Graham Moore, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay of The Imitation Game. Moore also serves as writer and showrunner alongside Jacqueline Hoyt — the showrunner being the person who runs the writers' room and holds final creative authority on day-to-day production. The directors include James Ponsoldt, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Mairzee Almas, Moore himself and Silver Tree (Variety).
The logline describes Bankman-Fried and Ellison as two young idealists accused of stealing $8 billion, becoming what the production calls "Gen Z's own Bonnie & Clyde." The series is inspired by New York Magazine articles written by Kevin T. Dugan and Jen Wieczner (Variety).
Barack and Michelle Obama serve as executive producers through their production company, Higher Ground, which has a multi-year deal with Netflix. Their involvement adds to a slate that has included both documentaries and scripted fiction since the company launched its Netflix partnership in 2018 (Variety).
The story behind The Altruists needs little introduction to anyone who followed the financial news cycle of 2022 and 2023. Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed in November 2022, wiping out billions in customer funds. Ellison, his former girlfriend, ran Alameda Research, FTX's affiliated trading firm. She pleaded guilty to fraud charges and testified against Bankman-Fried at his 2023 criminal trial, where he was convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. An IMDb listing for the series characterises its story as following the tumultuous romance between the two and the resulting $36 billion fraud (IMDb).
What makes the series stand out is the speed of its turn from headline to screen. The FTX collapse is less than four years behind the November release date, which is quick by the standards of scripted drama — where development cycles typically run longer than news cycles. Moore and Hoyt's decision to anchor the story in magazine reporting rather than a single book gives the writers' room multiple entry points into a story that played out in public, in real time, across Twitter threads and court filings.
Eight episodes is a standard mid-range order for a Netflix drama, suggesting a closed or near-closed story rather than an open-ended series designed to run for multiple seasons. The first-look photos, released alongside the date announcement, give audiences their earliest glimpse of Garner and Boyle in character — though the images themselves have not been described in detail in the reporting.
All eight episodes of The Altruists arrive on Netflix on November 19.
