$500 million Entry, $1.3 billion Fire Sale, now worth $77.2 billion, the AI powerhouse SBF once bet on can now "fill" 10 FTXs

BlockBeats News, June 8th. Today, as SBF officially submitted a pardon application to U.S. President Trump, a set of numbers continued to haunt all insiders outside prison—the card he bought with client funds on the eve of the AI outbreak, now valued at approximately $77.2 billion on today's books, nearly 10 times the amount of the FTX bankruptcy that year.

In April 2022, "large language model" was still a niche term in the academic world. SBF led the $500 million investment in Anthropic Series B through Alameda Research, holding 86% of this round's shares and obtaining about 8% equity. At that time, Anthropic was only valued at $25 billion. Seven months later, FTX collapsed.

In hindsight, the actions of the receivership legal team seemed like a brutal fire sale. In 2024, the bankruptcy liquidator sold this equity in two batches, cashing out a total of approximately $1.3 billion. Buyers included the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala and SBF's former employer, Jane Street—an ironic detail: the quant giant that nurtured him was now taking away the assets he bought with illicit funds at a bargain price.

Subsequently, the AI wave completely rewrote the valuation logic. In May 2026, Anthropic completed a $650 billion Series H financing led by Altimeter, Sequoia, and other institutions, valuing the company at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI for the first time and approaching the trillion-dollar threshold. By this calculation, the present-day value of that 8% equity is approximately $77.2 billion—59 times the actual sale price of $1.3 billion, nearly 10 times the $8 billion funding gap FTX faced that year.

SBF himself did not remain silent. He once criticized the receivership lawyer on X, saying, "The lawyer in charge of the bankruptcy application said Anthropic was worthless, then sold the equity for $1.3 billion. FTX never went bankrupt; the lawyers applied for a fake bankruptcy four hours after taking over the company, all for personal gain."

The $8 billion hole and the $77.2 billion missed opportunity fundamentally stem from the decisions of the same person during the same period—the former being the cost of squandering client funds, and the latter being the era's dividend he stumbled upon in chaos. He chose the right track but used the wrong money, losing to a compliance collapse rather than a judgment error.