In April 2023, FTX's estate sold a 5% stake in AI coding startup Cursor for $200,000, a valuation that has skyrocketed to approximately $3 billion following SpaceX's agreement to acquire the company at a $60 billion valuation. This staggering increase has brought attention to the crypto angle, as Alameda Research, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, initially invested $200,000 in Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, in April 2022.
The investment represented a 5% stake at a $4 million valuation. However, after FTX's collapse, the court-appointed estate sold the stake for the same $200,000, resulting in a significant loss for creditors. The gap between the sale price and the current valuation represents a 15,000x return, which could have been realized by the estate if the asset had not been liquidated.
This incident has sparked debate, particularly given Bankman-Fried's arguments that the estate's rapid asset liquidation destroyed billions in value, and that customers could have received more if the process had been handled differently. The Cursor stake's trajectory is one of the steepest in software startup history, with the company launching its AI coding product in early 2023, the same year the estate sold the stake.
While FTX customers have been repaid in dollar terms, they did not receive the upside from the assets' subsequent growth, including the $3 billion forgone recovery from the Cursor stake.