If FTX had held its Anthropic stake after its 2022 collapse, it'd be worth about $75B on paper. Instead, it sold for $1.3B. Who got the upside?

That stake is the part of FTX that got reborn. It finally paid off this year, for an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, a Wall Street trading firm and a couple dozen other investors who bought it out of the bankruptcy.

The FTX Recovery Trust sent out its fifth round of payments, about $900 million, on July 31, and every major group of creditors has now collected more than 100% of its claims. John J. Ray III, who was hired to run FTX and now helms the trust, has called it “the largest and most complex bankruptcy estate asset distribution in history.”

But creditors won’t have a share in Anthropic’s rise. The estate sold the shares in 2024 and got about $1.3 billion, which looked like a good price at the time. Then on May 28, Anthropic raised money at a $965 billion valuation. If you run the new number against the stake FTX gave up, you’ll land somewhere between $60 billion and $77 billion on paper, depending on how the dilution is counted.

The bet that outlived the exchange

Bankman-Fried had put the money in through an FTX subsidiary called Clifton Bay, as far back as when Anthropic was barely a year old. Court filings in the Chapter 11 case (No. 22-11068, District of Delaware) say the stake came to about 8% of the company by the time the estate got ready to sell. It was one of the most valuable things FTX had left.

But not everyone wanted to sell. A group of customers fought it in court before settling, and U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey cleared the sale in February 2024. The first deal came together on March 22, 2024: 29.5 million shares, 24 buyers, $884 million. That’s well over twice what those shares had cost FTX.

Who bought at $30 a share?

The biggest block went to ATIC Third International Investment Co., a firm tied to Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds. ATIC paid just under $500 million, per the sale filing. Jane Street, the trading firm where Bankman-Fried worked before he started FTX, paid $100 million for 3.3 million shares. Funds run by Fidelity, the Ford Foundation and a venture firm called HOF Capital took smaller pieces. CNBC reported at the time that several sovereign funds wanted in and that Saudi buyers got shut out on national security grounds.

A few months later, in June 2024, the last 15 million shares went for the same $30 price, bringing in more than $450 million. G Squared, a venture investor, took the biggest chunk of those. Anthropic is still private, and nobody can sell a stake that size at the headline price anyway. The company told investors its revenue passed a $47 billion annual pace in May.

Paid back in full — in 2022 dollars

Every claim, though, was valued on November 11, 2022, the day FTX filed, when bitcoin was trading in the mid-$16,000s. If you had one bitcoin on the exchange when it froze, for instance, the plan pegged your claim at exactly $16,871, plus interest, and the number doesn’t move no matter what bitcoin does now. The fifth round FTX announced on July 31 took total recoveries to 103% to 120%, depending on the type of claim, after roughly $10 billion went out across the first four rounds. Even preferred shareholders, who normally get nothing in a bankruptcy, have collected $95 million.

However, the math is exactly what Sunil Kavuri, who spoke for the biggest bloc of FTX creditors, fought in court in 2024. He argued and insisted that 2022 pricing leaves customers far short of what their crypto would be worth. The plan went through anyway. And to be fair to the estate, its job in the bankruptcy was turning assets into cash for creditors. In early 2024, nobody had Anthropic penciled in anywhere near a trillion dollars.

If you’re ever owed money by a failed company — a frozen platform, a business client that goes under — keep this rule in mind (always). Your claim gets fixed in dollars on the day of the filing. Whatever the assets turn into after that belongs to whoever buys them.

For now, the trust says more payment dates are coming, all in 2022 dollars. The Anthropic shares, meanwhile, are doing just fine for their new owners.