Sam Bankman-Fried's $500 million bet on Anthropic is about to be worth ~$50 billion.
That's a 100x, and he won't see a cent of it.
He made that bet in April 2022, a 30-year-old in cargo shorts who slept on a beanbag at the office.
Claude wasn't even out yet. Anthropic had $0 in sales.
By November FTX was dead, and $8 billion of customer money was missing.
Prosecutors say the $500 million for Anthropic came out of that money too.
In 2024 the FTX bankruptcy team sold the shares for $1.3 billion to pay people back.
Back then 2.7x looked like a great exit.
WSJ says Anthropic plans to go public this November at around $2 trillion.
At that price, those shares would be worth about $50 billion, nearly 40x what they sold for.
He'll watch the IPO from a prison in LA, 3 years into a 25-year sentence.
In April his X account posted a chart of FTX's old bets and 3 words: "many such cases…"
The bet needed 4 years to pay off. He lasted 6 months.
If you've ever been liquidated 5 minutes before the move, you know the feeling.
Being right is worth $0 if you're not around when it pays.