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

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Bankruptcy administrators who sell too early learn just before the largest A.I. I.P.O. ever what bad timing costs: FTX creditors received about $1.3 billion (about €1.2 billion) for their Anthropic stake, and at a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion it would have been worth $41 billion to $54 billion (about €36 billion to €48 billion). They have missed out on roughly $40 billion to $53 billion.

The comparison has limits, because at the time of the sales the price stood at Series D levels, $30 per preferred share. Still, the math shows how dramatically an early bet on Anthropic has paid off.

How FTX Got Into Anthropic

Sam Bankman-Fried led Anthropic’s Series B round in 2022, which raised about $580 million. According to press reports, FTX and Alameda contributed roughly $500 million of that. At the Series B price of $11.2261 per preferred share, as shown in Anthropic’s I.P.O. prospectus, that works out to about 44.5 million shares. After Anthropic’s 10-for-1 stock split, that is roughly 445 million shares today, or about 2.7 percent of the fully diluted company.

Two Sales, $1.3 Billion

In the spring of 2024, the bankruptcy court approved the sale of two-thirds of the stake for $884 million. Buyers included an entity linked to Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, with almost $500 million, Jane Street with nearly $100 million and Fidelity funds. A few weeks later, the rest, 15 million shares at $30 each, went for more than $450 million. Together, about 29.5 million plus 15 million shares add up to the original stake.

What the Stake Would Be Worth Today

The math is simple: 445 million shares times the share price. With 16.4 billion fully diluted shares, the values look like this:

• $1.5 trillion valuation: about $91.6 per share, stake worth roughly $40.8 billion
• $1.75 trillion valuation: about $106.8 per share, stake worth roughly $47.6 billion
• $2 trillion valuation: about $122.1 per share, stake worth roughly $54.4 billion

That is about 30 to 40 times what creditors collected. The figures are our own estimate based on the prospectus and press reports and exclude the new shares from the I.P.O. itself.

The Second Package: Ellison and Singh

Another piece of the FTX story appears in the prospectus. In the fall of 2025, Anthropic repurchased exactly 4,453,900 Series B shares from the U.S. government, which former holders had forfeited in legal proceedings, and resold them at the Series F price of $140.97 to nine investors. The total came to about $627 million.

The prospectus names no names. The number matches exactly the $50 million that Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh reportedly invested in the Series B in 2022. That package would be worth $4.1 billion to $5.4 billion today.

The Counterargument

The estate had good reasons to sell. Under the reorganization plan, most customers are to receive 118 percent of their claims in cash, valued as of the date of the bankruptcy. That required cash, since illiquid stakes in a private start-up do not pay out creditors. An I.P.O. was nowhere in sight in 2024, and Anthropic was valued at about $18 billion at the time. Some customers had also argued that the shares may have been bought with customer funds, which added pressure to sell.

Who Stands to Gain From the I.P.O.

Observers see the biggest winners among early backers such as Eric Schmidt and Jaan Tallinn, as well as Spark Capital, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Amazon, Google and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. Spark, for example, is poised to turn about $777 million into roughly $10.9 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation, according to PitchBook. OpenAI, Anthropic’s rival, is reportedly expected to go public next year and will be measured against how Anthropic’s debut goes.