FTX Misses Out on Tens of Billions in Returns from Anthropic and Cursor. SBF Says He Will Issue Tokens Again After Prison, Do You Still Dare to Buy?

TradingKey - SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor means FTX has once again missed out on massive returns, yet it also underscores SBF's unique investment foresight.

On June 16, Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX) announced the acquisition of AI programming assistant Cursor for $60 billion, a deal that not only garnered widespread attention in traditional financial markets but also triggered extensive debate and irony in the cryptocurrency community.

As early as 2022, FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), invested $200,000 in Cursor for an approximate 5% stake. However, due to FTX's bankruptcy liquidation, the liquidation team sold the stake back to the founders in 2023 at its original cost of $200,000. With SpaceX now acquiring Cursor in its entirety at a $60 billion valuation, FTX's initial $200,000 investment would have been worth a staggering $3 billion today.

Adding to the irony, FTX not only missed out on massive returns from Cursor but also forfeited even larger potential gains from another AI firm, Anthropic. In 2021, FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic for roughly an 8% stake. Due to the bankruptcy proceedings, FTX was forced to liquidate its entire holding for $1.3 billion. Today, Anthropic's valuation has soared past $900 billion, meaning FTX's former stake would now be worth over $70 billion.

FTX's missed windfalls from these two AI giants present a stark paradox to the market: SBF indeed possessed an incredibly sharp eye for investment, yet he completely lacked moral boundaries and any sense of risk management. His willingness to wage high-risk gambles using customers' hard-earned money is as shocking as it is alarming—where a win burnished his 'genius' while a loss spelled disaster for everyone else. However, SBF's prison sentence may not completely end his high-rolling gambling habits.

According to New York Magazine 's report on June 16, SBF, who is currently serving his sentence at the Lompoc Federal Correctional Institution in California, previously remarked that 'once out of prison, I will issue a new token, and everyone will flock to it.' Last Monday (June 8), SBF applied for a presidential pardon, but the appeal was rejected on June 12, with the court upholding his 25-year sentence. According to Polymarket data, the probability of SBF receiving a pardon by July 31 is a mere 3%, with only a 5% chance of being released by the end of the year.

Based on the sentencing, SBF will likely remain in federal prison until around 2050. By then, global regulatory frameworks will have matured to the point where no compliant exchanges or institutions would permit the listing of any project he launches. While rational investors and industry professionals will steer clear of him, the possibility of speculators purchasing his new token cannot be entirely ruled out.

Although he has received a moral and legal 'death sentence,' one cannot underestimate the obsession of certain speculative circles in the crypto space with dark humor and negative notoriety. If he indeed releases a token after his release decades from now, the market will highly likely trade it as a premier meme coin. Speculators will have no illusions that his project can change the world; instead, they will seek to exploit the massive attention surrounding the historic spectacle of 'SBF's release' to execute rapid in-and-out trades for windfall profits.