The same investment bets that helped build Sam Bankman’s Fried empire became a case study in early selling.
As bankrupt FTX races to pay off creditors, it has offloaded early stakes in companies that have come to rank among the most valuable names in artificial intelligence and fintech, often for a fraction of what it would later control.
“This guy knew how to trade his client’s money, but he ran out of time,” one user said .
Alameda Research has written a $200,000 check to Anysphere, maker of AI encryption tool Cursor, during a pre-funding round in 2022.
In 2023, the company sold this position at cost, treating the then-obscure developer instrument as a secondary asset to be liquidated.
to acquire Cursor, based on a call option that the rocket company first acquired in April 2026.
في هذا التقييم، تبلغ قيمة الحصة المهملة البالغة 5٪ حوالي 3 مليارات دولار. On paper, the position left by the estate in exchange for pocket change would now be among the most valuable assets it has ever touched.
“SBF’s sleepless nights just got worse… In 2022, Alameda (FTX) dropped $200k in a pre-seed stake in Cursor → ~5% stake at a ~$4m valuation. FTX’s bankruptcy sold the entire position back at cost. Today, that 5% would be worth $3b – a 15,000x return.” Comment
Follow us on XTo get the latest news as it happens
FTX pumped about $500 million into Anthropic in 2021, one of the largest private checks written at the AI lab before ChatGPT existed.
- An additional $452 million in June of that year, nearly $1.3 billion combined.
Anthropic has since raised a $30 billion round at a post-money valuation of $380 billion, according to the company’s own filing.
The same 8% stake would now be worth more than $30 billion, which BeInCrypto referred to as an exit.
“He made all these bets when he was 29, while running a $32 billion stock exchange… Real estate wasn’t allowed to hold it. Say what you want. The guy had an eye,” said investor Sjoll. He added.
However, the roughly 23x gap between the selling price and current value is the clearest sign of how tight selling conflicts with the timing of frontier technology.
Emergent Fidelity Technologies, the Antigua-registered company controlled by Bankman-Fried, will buy a 7.6% stake in Robinhood for about $648 million in 2022.
After the crash, US prosecutors seized the shares, and in 2023 the US Marshals Service sold 55.3 million of them back to Robinhood at $10.96 apiece, a deal worth $605.7 million.
This same block would be worth more than $5 billion at Robinhood’s current valuation near $87 billion.
Solana (SOL) hits close to home, given that Alameda was one of the early backers of the token.
Under a court-approved process in 2024, the company sold nearly 30 million locked SOLs at about $64 each, with Galaxy Digital and Pantera Capital among the largest buyers.
And token notes worth about $96 million, roughly $101 million the exchange had paid out the previous year.
Taken together, the exits trace a portfolio of early access to high-profile companies that were undone by bankruptcies that forced flash sales to pay off defrauded customers.
“Sam Bankman Fried is the greatest investor of all time…which means if he weren’t in prison today and still owned all those stocks, he would be worth $100 billion…he would be among the 20 richest people in the world.” male
The estate, managed by veteran John G. Ray III, needed cash on a court schedule rather than the patience an investment fund could afford.
Whether it sold too cheaply or simply couldn’t wait is a debate that grows more heated with each new financing round and acquisitions tied to its previous holdings.
this post SBF sold out too early: these exit bets later turned into multibillion-dollar winners appeared first on BeInCrypto.
