FTX’s bankruptcy estate offloaded a roughly 5% stake in AI coding startup Anysphere for $200,000 in 2023, the exact amount it paid at entry. With SpaceX now holding a $60 billion option to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of popular AI code editor Cursor, that liquidation decision has resurfaced as one of the most expensive oversights in crypto bankruptcy history.
SpaceX Enters the Picture
On April 21, 2026, SpaceX announced it had struck a deal with Anysphere that hands it the right to acquire Cursor outright for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for the collaborative work the two companies are undertaking together.
That $10 billion figure alone would rank among the largest breakup payments in corporate history if SpaceX opts not to close the acquisition.
The partnership will pair Cursor’s deep footprint among professional software developers with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, a machine the company says carries the equivalent processing power of one million Nvidia H100 GPUs. Together, the companies plan to build what they describe as the world’s most capable AI for coding and knowledge work.
Your completely free resource hub designed to boost your knowledge of cryptocurrencies
The deal did not arrive from nowhere. In the week before the announcement, reports emerged that xAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, had begun renting computing capacity from its data centers to Cursor for model training.
Around the same time, two senior Cursor engineering leaders, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, departed the startup to join xAI, where both now report directly to Musk. The SpaceX partnership formalizes what had been a rapidly developing working relationship.
How FTX Got Here
In April 2022, Alameda Research, the trading arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire, participated in Anysphere’s $400,000 pre-seed funding round.
Alameda contributed $200,000 through an entity called Clifton Bay Investments LLC, formerly known as Alameda Research Ventures, securing approximately 5% of the company’s equity alongside co-investor Heroic Ventures.
Six months later, in November 2022, FTX collapsed. The exchange fell into bankruptcy after revelations that billions of dollars in customer funds had been misused to cover Alameda’s trading losses and bad bets. Bankman-Fried was subsequently convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
FTX’s bankruptcy estate, managed by court-appointed administrators, was left to liquidate the group’s assets and distribute proceeds to creditors who had lost their money in the collapse.
In April 2023, those administrators sold Clifton Bay’s equity position in Anysphere for $200,000, no premium, no upside capture, just a clean exit at cost. At that point, Cursor had barely launched and Anysphere had not yet raised its seed round.
The decision to sell, while understandable within the pressures of a complex bankruptcy, would prove extraordinarily costly in hindsight.
A Pattern of Premature Exits
The Cursor stake is not an isolated case. FTX’s bankruptcy administrators have faced repeated criticism for selling valuable assets before their value matured.
In March 2024, the estate sold token contracts tied to the SUI blockchain for $1 million, contracts that have since risen to an estimated $3 billion in value. The estate also sold $95 million in Mysten Labs shares alongside the SUI contracts.
The picture with Anthropic is more nuanced. FTX and Alameda had invested $500 million in the AI safety company, securing an 8% stake.
The estate sold roughly two-thirds of those shares in March 2024 for $884 million, with the remainder offloaded by mid-2024 for $452 million, bringing total Anthropic proceeds to $1.3 billion. While the return was meaningful, Anthropic’s continued growth means even that sale left hundreds of millions on the table.
Cursor’s Ascent Since the Sale
The scale of what FTX walked away from has only grown sharper as Cursor’s trajectory accelerated.
After the estate exited in April 2023, Anysphere raised an $8 million seed round in October 2023, followed by a $60 million Series A in August 2024, a $105 million Series B in December 2024 at a $2.5 billion valuation, and a $2.3 billion Series D in November 2025 that assigned the company a $29.3 billion post-money valuation.
The company surpassed $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue with year-over-year growth exceeding 9,900%. More than one million developers now use the platform daily.
Cursor is a fork of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code with deep AI integration, allowing developers to write, edit, and generate code using natural language prompts. It competes directly with GitHub Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude Code, and counts Stripe, OpenAI, and Spotify among its enterprise clients.
Researcher Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla and OpenAI engineer, famously coined the term “vibe coding” partly in reference to how Cursor enables developers to direct AI almost conversationally.
What It Means for Creditors Now
With Anysphere’s valuation now surpassing $50 billion in current fundraising negotiations, FTX’s original 5% position would theoretically be worth billions of dollars, funds that could have materially accelerated repayment for the thousands of creditors still recovering losses from the exchange’s collapse.
The SpaceX deal is not yet finalized. SpaceX holds the acquisition option for exercise later in 2026, and the company is simultaneously preparing for what is expected to be the largest IPO in history at a targeted valuation of $1.75 trillion.
Whether the $60 billion buyout closes or not, the price tag attached to Cursor today makes FTX’s $200,000 exit a defining symbol of what happens when bankruptcy urgency overrides strategic patience.
