In a Twitter post yesterday afternoon, SpaceX revealed that it had forged a partnership with AI coding company Cursor.
In really simple terms, Cursor allows people to speak in plain English, and then Cursor turns their requests into code. So a person who never learned a coding language can just speak normally, and Cursor will “vibe code” what they want into a website, app, or software program.
Most importantly, yesterday’s Tweet revealed that, “Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion…“
Given the company is just a few years old, a $60 billion potential exit is nothing short of astonishing. Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, was founded in 2022 by four MIT students. Not former students. The four founders were still enrolled at MIT as undergrads when the company was founded.
In October 2023, Anysphere raised $11 million from several angel investors and VC funds. The meat of this round was an $8 million check led directly by the OpenAI Startup Fund. This round valued Anysphere at $59 million.
By late 2024, two additional funding rounds worth a combined $165 million boosted Anysphere’s valuation to $2.6 billion. These 2024 rounds brought on a who’s who of tech VCs, including Thrive Capital, Andreesen Horowitz, Accel, DST Global, plus a half dozen extremely rich and prominent individual investors.
By late 2025, two additional funding rounds worth just over $3 billion boosted Anysphere’s valuation to an astonishing $30 billion. Google Ventures and NVIDIA came aboard in this period.
And now SpaceX might take the whole thing off the table in a $60 billion acquisition later this year. Pretty amazing.
But actually, let me step back a moment. I actually left off one early investor. In fact, I left off Cursor’s very FIRST investor.
A full year and a half before Cursor raised $11 million, when the founders were still enrolled at MIT, they put out feelers seeking to raise a modest $400,000 to help get their AI coding project off the ground. And, as fate would have it, in walked the greatest venture capital investor of all time:
Sam Bankman-Fried
That’s right. In April 2022, the now-disgraced FTX founder gobbled up a full half of the $400,000 Anysphere was seeking to raise. That $200,000 investment, which was made through his other company, Alameda Research, bought a 5% stake in Anysphere at a $4 million valuation.
So, if this SpaceX deal happens, will Sam and his FTX/Alameda investors/victims receive a $3 BILLION windfall later this year? Unfortunately, no. Because in 2023, the dumbass administrators of FTX’s bankruptcy offloaded the company’s Cursor stake for…
$200,000
Enragingly, that is not the only early VC bet that the administrators sold for pennies. As I said a moment ago, love him or hate him, Sam was the greatest VC investor of all time. Here’s a brief recap of his best bets and what could have been today in a hypothetical world where FTX never collapsed, and he never went to jail.
Craig Barritt/Getty Images
#1. The $64 Billion Anthropic Blunder
Back in 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried decided to invest in an AI research startup founded by former OpenAI executives. That startup was Anthropic.
Unlike his relatively puny Cursor investment, SBF went BIG into Anthropic. At a time when 99% of society had not heard of ChatGPT or Large Language Models and most people would have thought “AI” referred to Allen Iverson or the 2001 Steven Spielberg movie starring Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law, Sam Bankman-Fried invested $500 million into Anthropic.
That massive check bought FTX an 8% stake in the company. Fast forward to 2024. The FTX bankruptcy administrators are sweating bullets trying to find cash to pay back angry customers, so they sell off an 8% stake in Anthropic to institutional buyers for $1.3 billion. They patted themselves on the back for a “massive win.”
Well, those administrators might want to look away from the financial news today. Just last week, it was rumored that Anthropic was raising money at a mind-melting $800 billion valuation. If SBF was still sitting in his Bahamas penthouse holding that 8% stake, it would be worth $64 billion.
#2. The $5 Billion Robinhood Robbery
SBF didn’t just stick to private startups; he also played the public markets. In early 2022, he quietly accumulated a massive 7.6% stake in the trading app Robinhood—roughly 55 million shares—for $648 million.
When FTX imploded, the US Department of Justice swooped in and seized the shares. In August 2023, the US Marshals essentially tossed the shares back to Robinhood at a discount, raising $605 million. A slight loss, but at least the government got some cash, right?
Wrong. Retail trading came roaring back. Had SBF held onto those shares through Robinhood’s massive resurgence over the last few years, that stake would be worth nearly $4.86 billion today.
#3. The Sui $4.45 Billion Surrender
In 2022, FTX Ventures led a $300 million funding round for Mysten Labs, the developers behind the Sui blockchain. For $101 million, SBF got preferred equity and the rights to roughly 890 million SUI tokens. He was buying the ground floor of the next major Web3 infrastructure play.
But in early 2023, the bankruptcy team panicked. They didn’t want to hold illiquid crypto assets, so they sold the stake back to Mysten Labs for $96.3 million. They took a loss just to wash their hands of it.
Today? The crypto market rebounded violently, and the Sui mainnet gained immense traction. Those 890 million SUI tokens alone are now worth roughly $4.45 billion.
#4. The Great Crypto Garage Sale
The missed windfalls don’t stop at venture capital. When the music stopped, FTX and Alameda held one of the most concentrated, lucrative crypto portfolios on the planet. SBF was the loudest champion of Solana, hoarding a staggering 41 million locked SOL tokens.
The bankruptcy estate took one look at that stash and essentially held a garage sale for Wall Street. They auctioned millions of SOL tokens to firms like Galaxy Digital at heavily discounted prices—around $64 a token—raising about $2.6 billion. They also dumped roughly 20,500 Bitcoin and 112,600 Ethereum right before the massive ETF-driven crypto resurgence.
Had they just sat on their hands and held SBF’s original crypto treasury, it would be worth nearly $8.5 billion today.
#4: The $15 Billion SpaceX Moonshot
We started this article by talking about how SpaceX secured the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion. Well, as it turns out, Sam was also a major investor in SpaceX!
In 2022, when SpaceX was valued at roughly $140 billion, SBF funneled $700 million to a venture firm called K5 Global. K5 then took roughly $200 million of that cash and invested it directly into Elon Musk’s aerospace company.
Plot twist: Unlike his other bets, the bankruptcy estate actually fought to keep this stake and reached a settlement to hold onto it. With SpaceX now reportedly eyeing a massive $1.75 Trillion valuation for its upcoming IPO later this year, SBF is calculating that his initial $200 million check would yield a 75x return, generating a $15 billion stake.
| Asset & Initial Inv. | Sale Price vs. 2026 Value |
|---|---|
| Anthropic Initial: $500 Million |
2026: $64.0 Billion
Sold For: $1.3 Billion |
| Robinhood (HOOD)
Initial: $648 Million |
2026: $4.86 Billion Sold For: $605 Million |
| Sui (Mysten Labs)
Initial: $101 Million |
2026: $4.45 Billion
Sold For: $96.3 Million |
| Cursor (Anysphere) Initial: $200,000 |
2026: $3.0 Billion
Sold For: $200,000 |
| Raw Crypto (SOL, BTC, ETH)
Initial: Accumulated |
2026: $8.5 Billion Sold For: ~$6.0 Billion |
| TOTALS
Initial: ~$1.25 Billion |
2026: ~$84.8 Billion
Sold For: ~$8.0 Billion |
The $85 Billion “What If”
When you add it all up, FTX’s administrators raised around $8 billion by selling off the company’s deep bench of assets and investment stakes (plus whatever they ultimately squeeze out of the SpaceX hold). And while raising billions may have felt like a big win to them at the moment, as you can see above, just holding onto the assets would have yielded one of the greatest fortunes in human history.
If you add up the “What If” value of Anthropic, SpaceX, Robinhood, Sui, Cursor, and the Solana stash, and a few other investments we left off, SBF’s holdings would be worth nearly $118 billion today.
In other words, the dumbass administrators left $110 billion on the table. (Even if you assume SBF’s math is slightly exaggerated, the scale of the missed fortune is historically unprecedented).
Now, we should also acknowledge that Sam wasn’t making these VC bets with his own money or even money raised to make investments in wildly risky startups. He was using money stolen from everyday FTX depositors.
It’s a lot easier to look like a visionary when you’re firing a bottomless money cannon loaded with other people’s cash. We also have to admit that SBF wasn’t exactly a calculated, spreadsheet-crunching genius. For every Anthropic or Cursor, there was a spectacularly stupid blunder. He incinerated billions trying to bail out doomed crypto lenders like BlockFi and Voyager, and he funneled a jaw-dropping $700 million to K5 Global seemingly just for the privilege of rubbing elbows with celebrities. He was basically a guy throwing darts at a board while blindfolded.
But honestly, that just makes the punchline even better.
The blindfolded guy throwing stolen darts also hit the biggest financial bullseyes of the 21st century. If he hadn’t committed historic fraud to cover his trading losses, he wouldn’t just be out of prison right now—he’d be sitting on a $118 billion war chest, universally hailed as the Warren Buffett of Web3, Space, and AI. Instead, he has to read about SpaceX buying his $200,000 startup for $60 billion from his jail cell at FCI Terminal Island in San Pedro, California, while serving a 25-year prison sentence.
What SBF’s Net Worth Could Have Been…
In the middle of 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth was $25 billion. The day before his empire collapsed in November 2022, he was worth $15 billion. Today, his net worth is effectively ZERO.
SBF didn’t own 100% of his empire. He had outside investors in FTX and co-founders in his various entities. Roughly speaking:
- SBF owned ~90% of Alameda Research (the trading firm that held the VC bets, the Robinhood stock, and the raw crypto treasury).
- SBF owned ~50% of FTX (the actual exchange platform).
I’m going to save you the full napkin math I just computed. Here’s the answer to what Sam would be worth today:
- Alameda Share: $106.2 Billion
- FTX Equity: $20 Billion
Hypothetical 2026 Net Worth: ~$126.2 Billion
