FTX sold its Cursor stake for $200,000 in 2023. It would be worth $3 billion today

SpaceX's agreement to acquire AI coding startup Cursor at a $60 billion valuation has retroactively turned a routine bankruptcy asset sale by FTX's estate into one of the largest missed recoveries in crypto history.

What to know:

• A 5 percent stake in AI coding startup Cursor that FTX’s bankruptcy estate sold for $200,000 in 2023 would be worth about $3 billion under SpaceX’s new $60 billion deal for the company.
• The windfall instead goes to the buyer of the bankruptcy stake, sharpening criticism that FTX’s administrators sold assets too quickly and left creditors without the upside from a historic tech rally.
• The Cursor episode is likely to become a centerpiece of Sam Bankman-Fried’s argument from prison—and his family’s push for a pardon—that the estate destroyed tens of billions in potential value by liquidating early.

A 5% stake in AI coding startup Cursor that FTX's bankruptcy estate sold for $200,000 in April 2023 would be worth about $3 billion today, following SpaceX's agreement this week to acquire the company at a $60 billion valuation.

SpaceX said Monday it has the right to buy Cursor later this year for $60 billion or to pay $10 billion if the full acquisition does not proceed. The deal is founder Elon Musk's move to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic on AI coding tools, an area where he recently said xAI, the Musk-run AI company that merged with SpaceX, is behind competitors.

SpaceX is holding off on immediate acquisition because of its planned initial public offering targeting a $2 trillion valuation, with the $10 billion serving as a breakup fee.

The crypto angle sits in the cap table. In April 2022, Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and run alongside FTX, invested $200,000 in Anysphere, the company that builds Cursor.

That investment bought roughly 5% of the company at a $4 million valuation. One year later FTX had collapsed, Alameda and FTX were in bankruptcy, and the court-appointed estate sold the Cursor stake for the same $200,000 Alameda had paid.

The stake is worth $3 billion at SpaceX's $60 billion price tag, meaning the gap between what the FTX estate received and what the position would fetch today is roughly a 15,000x return. It was instead realized by whoever bought it from the bankruptcy rather than the creditors the estate was supposed to be maximizing recovery for.

The timing cuts awkwardly for FTX's bankruptcy administration.

Bankman-Fried, currently serving a 25-year federal sentence, has spent the past year arguing from prison that FTX's estate destroyed billions in value by liquidating assets too quickly during the bankruptcy, and that customers could have been made more than whole if the process had held positions instead of selling them into what turned out to be the bottom of crypto prices.

In February, he shared a projection suggesting FTX's net asset value would have reached $78 billion if the estate had held assets through the subsequent recovery rather than selling in 2023 and 2024.

Cursor launched its AI coding product in early 2023, the same year the estate sold the stake, and the company's trajectory from that launch to its current valuation three years later is among the steepest in software startup history.

FTX customers have since been made whole in dollar terms under the bankruptcy's distribution plan, receiving back their claim values plus interest. What they did not receive is the upside from what those assets became between the bankruptcy filing and now, which in the case of the Cursor stake alone represents about $3 billion of forgone recovery against $200,000 realized.

Bankman-Fried's parents have publicly advocated for a pardon, appearing on CNN in March arguing that FTX customers were ultimately repaid and that the case against their son should be revisited. The Cursor number is likely to feature prominently in the family's continued campaign, and in Bankman-Fried's own letters from prison, as the single clearest example of the kind of value he claims the estate destroyed through forced selling.

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