FTX fire sales cost creditors an estimated $35B in missed gains

FTX Bankruptcy Estate Missed Billions on Early AI Startup Sales

The full scale of missed opportunity from the FTX bankruptcy estate’s fire sales of venture investments has come into sharper focus this week, after SpaceX formally agreed to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion — a deal that makes a stake once held by Alameda Research worth an estimated $3 billion.

The Cursor Stake: From $200,000 to $3 Billion

In April 2022, Alameda Research — the trading firm tied to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried — invested $200,000 in Anysphere, the parent company of the AI code editor Cursor, securing roughly a 5% stake. Seven months later, FTX collapsed. During the bankruptcy proceedings in April 2023, the estate’s liquidators sold the Anysphere position back at cost — the same $200,000 Alameda had originally paid.coindesk

On June 16, SpaceX disclosed that it had exercised its option to acquire Anysphere for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction, days after completing the largest IPO in history. At that valuation, the 5% stake FTX offloaded for $200,000 would now be worth approximately $3 billion — a gap representing a roughly 15,000x return that creditors will never see.reuters

Anthropic: Another Billion-Dollar Miss

The Cursor episode was not the estate’s only costly exit. FTX had invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, securing an 8% stake. The estate sold that holding in two tranches during 2024, collecting approximately $1.3 billion total. But Anthropic’s valuation has since climbed to $380 billion, meaning the position would now be worth more than $30 billion. The majority of the Anthropic shares were sold to a consortium including ATIC Third International Investment Co., aligned with the UAE sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, for $884 million in a deal disclosed to a Delaware court in March 2024.nbcnewyork

Structural Constraints Behind the Losses

The losses were not the result of a single poor decision but of the structural pressures facing bankruptcy estates. Liquidators operated under court supervision with a mandate to convert assets to cash quickly to repay creditors, not to speculate on venture outcomes. At the time the Cursor stake was sold, Anysphere was a little-known startup with no obvious path to a $60 billion exit. Taken together, however, the forced sales of positions in Cursor, Anthropic, Solana, and Robinhood have cost creditors an estimated $35 billion in unrealized gains, according to an analysis by The Currency Analytics.ccn

The SpaceX-Cursor deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval.forbes