FTX's former Anthropic stake would be worth about $75B at today's valuation

If only Sam wasn't caught, then he'd have more than enough to refill what he stole, ironic.

Assuming they would not have liquidated it earlier (perhaps via some semi-legal instrument) to cover past or future bad decisions. Crypto certainly isn’t doing well now.

The 7.84% state would probably be significantly diluted over this time frame so 4-5% is probably a more accurate estimate but perhaps high estimate.

Liquidity has value too. Many FTX customers needed immediate liquidity. If you need immediate liquidity the value proposition years later is meaningless for most people because most people can’t get any bridge financing to cover the gap.

Mt. Gox also ran a fractional exchange for a long time until the bottom fell out. The trouble is that you simply can’t run an unannounced fractional exchange.

Trustees, not estate.

If only the role of trustees wasn't to do as they can to make creditors as whole as possible now, without risk, rather than keep playing the same kind of bets that got the bankrupt entity into the hole it was in...

From the SBF trial:

> Jury leave, witness [Ellison] leaves.

> Judge: We can talk about [Anthopic] What about it?

> AUSA: Post-collapse performance is irrelevant.

> SBF's lawyer: It was a $91 million investment now worth $1 billion.

> Judge Kaplan: The crime charged is that he took the money.

https://x.com/innercitypress/status/1712199547915813241

Would have could have, holding it is the main difficulty, not as hard as buying. Millions of stories where if they held NVDA/bitcoin, they’d be rich

Yeah, and if he had taken all that money, bet it on black, and won in roulette a couple times, he'd have also made a killing. Didn't mean it was the right strategy or a moral decision with people's savings.

> That implies the former FTX stake would be worth about $75B before further dilution.

> FTX’s customer shortfall was roughly $8B to $9B.

I think these hindsight analyses are interesting because they're leading a lot of into retroactively playing devil's advocate for SBF.

It is interesting to imagine a world where FTX made a one-time oopsie, broke some laws to cover it up, but then put all the money back and recovered like nothing ever happened.

You have to remember that this was literally their plan, though. They tried that. It didn't work.

If it had worked, they would have had to spend years hiding the facts from auditors and hoping that none of their employees ever leaked the info or tried to claim a whistleblower reward for what they knew.

If they had gotten past all of that, their continued existence would hinge on them not getting into the same position again. I have my doubts about that. Usually when people in these positions get away with their crimes they are only emboldened to continue taking the same or more risks in the future.

How did they have such a large stake? Is this some sort of social club between the Amodei’s and SBF because they share the same ideology (effective altruism)? Did Anthropic get partially funded by stolen money as a result? If so, that’s just gross and puts me off Anthropic.

So, if FTX had managed to stay afloat a bit longer, they could have gotten away with it.

Which is a much more interesting statement in the context of certain other crypto organizations than it is about FTX...

One hypothetical outcome if FTX had not been shut down when it was might have been "there was never a mass withdrawl of funds from FTX that would trigger an FTX liquidity crisis and Alemeda switched its strategy to 100% HODL, waited until exactly now before selling, thus making all the Alameda investors rich and covering the funds 'invested' by FTX so no harm, no foul".

Amother hypothetical outcome might have been "Alameda continued to make risky, over-leveraged investments, immediately rolling any gains into other over-leversged investments and using FTX's customer's money to cover losses until disaster struck".

I find the second hypothetical a bit more plausible than the first, but I probably just don't understand finance.

If i was an ftx customer i would have wanted to be paid in shares of equity and not whatever cryptovalue they paid out years later. This is regardless of today's newspaper