When SpaceX announced this week that it secured the right to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, the headline was about Elon Musk’s latest AI bet. Buried in the fine print was a more uncomfortable story: a 5% stake in Cursor that FTX’s bankruptcy estate sold for $200,000 in 2023 would be worth $3 billion today. None of that upside went to creditors.
SpaceX and Cursor: what the $60 billion deal actually involves
SpaceX said it struck a deal with Cursor, the San Francisco-based AI coding tool maker, giving it the right to buy the startup outright for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for a joint model training collaboration if the full acquisition falls through. Cursor CEO Michael Truell called it “a meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI.”
Cursor has been one of the fastest-growing software startups in recent years, hitting $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under two years and reaching a $29 billion valuation in November. But the company’s own blog acknowledges that limited computing power had “bottlenecked” its model training. SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, built through its February merger with Musk’s xAI, solves that.
The deal isn’t really about coding tools. Musk is steering SpaceX hard into AI ahead of what could be the largest IPO in history, targeting a $2 trillion valuation as early as June. xAI’s coding efforts have fallen behind OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, and Cursor’s established product gives SpaceX a shortcut it badly needs.
FTX sold its Cursor stake for $200,000. It’s now worth $3 billion.
Here’s where the story gets strange. In April 2022, Alameda Research, the trading firm Sam Bankman-Fried ran alongside FTX, invested $200,000 in Anysphere, the company behind Cursor. That bought roughly 5% of the company at a $4 million valuation. Six months later, FTX collapsed.
When the FTX bankruptcy estate began liquidating assets in 2023, it sold the Cursor stake for the same $200,000 Alameda had originally paid. No gain, despite Cursor having already launched its AI coding product and started its rapid climb. Nobody knows who bought it.
At SpaceX’s $60 billion valuation, that 5% stake is worth around $3 billion. A 15,000x return. That went to whoever bought it from the bankruptcy, not to the creditors.
SBF’s “estate destroyed value” argument just got a lot stronger
Awkward timing for FTX’s administrators. Bankman-Fried, currently serving a 25-year sentence, has argued from prison that the estate destroyed billions in value by selling assets too quickly. In February, he claimed FTX’s assets would have been worth $78 billion had the estate held positions through the market’s recovery rather than selling into its bottom.
FTX creditors were made whole in dollar terms. They got their claim values back, plus interest. What they didn’t get was the upside from what those assets became. On the Cursor stake alone, that’s $3 billion they’ll never see on an initial $200,000 investment.
Whether his broader argument holds up legally is another question. But the Cursor sale is hard to ignore. The estate sold at the exact wrong time, and whoever bought it walked away with one of the better trades in recent tech history.
