Sam Bankman-Fried’s Venture Bets Would Have Made Him $100 Billion Richer Had He Stayed Out Of Prison |
Spend enough time on X these days and you may see a number of posts marveling at Sam Bankman-Fried’s venture “genius.”
Had FTX not imploded, its founder might now be remembered as one of the greatest venture investors ever, they say. Anthropic, Cursor, Robinhood — these were just a few of the hundreds of bets Bankman-Fried made when his crypto empire was thriving.
“The fact that Sam invested early in Anthropic and Cursor is astonishing,” marvels Rory O’Driscoll, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, of two of Silicon Valley's leading artificial intelligence companies. Cursor, an AI coding specialist, has recently struck a deal with SpaceX potentially valuing it at $60 billion, and Anthropic, one of the AI leaders, is being valued at $900 billion. “To pick two of the most important companies in the post-’21 crash and nail it…What a talent, what a willingness to look at new stuff before the ChatGPT moment, when people were saying, ‘this might work, who knows.’”
Except, of course, for the matter of whose money Bankman-Fried was investing. Once hailed as the “next Warren Buffett,” he is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence in San Pedro, CA for orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in history and stealing more than $8 billion from FTX customers, in part to fund these investments. Before his arrest in December 2022, he graced the cover of the Forbes 400 and was estimated to have a personal fortune of $24 billion at its peak.
FTX launched in 2019 and raised approximately $2 billion in venture funding. The crypto exchange quickly became one of the world's largest. Bitcoin was racing toward what was then an astonishing high of roughly $69,000, and FTX was printing money the way exchanges do: by collecting fees on every trade. Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, was also everywhere — market making and placing risky bets........