The FTX bankruptcy estate sold a stake in Cursor’s parent company for $200,000 in April 2023. At the valuation attached to SpaceX’s latest deal, that same position would now be worth roughly $3 billion. The benchmark comes from an agreement announced this week under which SpaceX can acquire Cursor later this year at a $60 billion valuation, or pay $10 billion if the full acquisition does not go through.
Alameda bought into Anysphere before FTX collapsed
The crypto link traces back to Alameda Research. According to the source material, the trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and run alongside FTX invested $200,000 in April 2022 in Anysphere, the company behind Cursor. That financing valued the company at $4 million and gave Alameda roughly a 5% stake.
By the following year, FTX and Alameda were in bankruptcy. The court-appointed estate then sold the Cursor stake for the same $200,000 Alameda had originally paid. Using the $60 billion price attached to SpaceX’s current agreement, that holding would now carry a value near $3 billion, creating a huge gap between the bankruptcy recovery and the stake’s present implied worth.
SpaceX ties deal to its AI coding push
SpaceX said Monday that it holds the right to buy Cursor later this year for $60 billion. If the acquisition is not completed in full, the company would pay a $10 billion breakup fee. The report says the move reflects Elon Musk’s effort to narrow the distance with OpenAI and Anthropic in AI coding tools, a segment where he recently said xAI trails rivals. xAI has merged with SpaceX, according to the same report.
SpaceX is not moving to immediate acquisition because it is preparing an initial public offering targeted at a $2 trillion valuation. Cursor launched its AI coding product in early 2023, the same year the FTX estate exited the investment. Three years later, its rise to the current valuation level stands as one of the sharpest climbs described in the report for a software startup.
Bankruptcy asset sales return to the spotlight
The missed upside lands at an uncomfortable moment for the FTX bankruptcy process. Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year federal sentence, and the article says he has spent the past year arguing from prison that the estate destroyed billions in value by selling assets too quickly during bankruptcy. His position has been that customers could have recovered more if the estate had held assets instead of liquidating them during the 2023 and 2024 period.
In February, he circulated a projection claiming FTX’s net asset value could have reached $78 billion if the estate had kept assets through the rebound rather than selling them. FTX customers have since been made whole in dollar terms under the distribution plan and also received interest. What they did not receive was the appreciation that occurred between the bankruptcy filing and today. In the case of the Cursor stake alone, the forgone upside is about $3 billion versus the $200,000 actually realized.
The report also notes that Bankman-Fried’s parents publicly pushed for a pardon in March and told CNN that FTX customers were eventually repaid and that the case should be revisited. The change in value of the Cursor investment is likely to remain central to that argument.