FTX Sold Too Early: Its Anthropic Stake Would Be Worth Up to $54 Billion

FTX creditors got the cash version of a very expensive lesson in timing. The bankrupt estate sold Anthropic stock for about $1.3 billion, but if that same stake were priced at Anthropic’s reported $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion valuation, it would be worth roughly $41 billion to $54 billion today.

The gap is huge, though not quite as simple as it sounds. When the estate sold, Anthropic was still valued around $18 billion, and the shares were changing hands at Series D levels, at $30 each. Even so, the markdown from potential value to sale price is eye-watering.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda backed Anthropic’s Series B round in 2022, which raised about $580 million. Press reports said they put in roughly $500 million of that. Using the Series B price of $11.2261 per preferred share, that works out to about 44.5 million shares before Anthropic’s 10-for-1 split, or roughly 445 million shares now, about 2.7 percent of the company on a fully diluted basis.

The estate sold two-thirds of the position in spring 2024 for $884 million, with buyers including an entity linked to Mubadala, Jane Street and Fidelity funds. A few weeks later, the remaining 15 million shares went for more than $450 million. That brought the total to about $1.3 billion. The prospectus-based math says that same stake would now be worth about 30 to 40 times that amount.

There was a real reason to sell, of course. The bankruptcy plan calls for most customers to get 118 percent of their claims in cash, and private start-up shares do not exactly mail out checks. But the trade still looks brutal in hindsight, especially with Anthropic now on the verge of the largest A.I. I.P.O. ever. And the FTX paper trail may get even uglier: a separate package tied to Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh could now be worth $4.1 billion to $5.4 billion.