First: SpaceX announced a strategic partnership with Cursor, granting SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, or paying $10 billion to advance their cooperation. Overnight, Cursor went from being the “most useful AI programming tool” to a “strategic asset endorsed by Musk.”

Second: Many may have forgotten that one of Cursor’s earliest institutional investors was Alameda Research.

In April 2022, Alameda invested $200k in the pre-seed round of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, acquiring about 5% equity.

This stake was sold at its original price during the FTX bankruptcy liquidation, and today it’s worth about $3 billion.

Also in April 2022, SBF invested $500 million through Alameda in the Series B round of Anthropic, taking about 8% of the company, which was leading the entire funding round with 86%.

What is Anthropic’s current scale? Its last private valuation was $380 billion; now, private market prices have broken the trillion-dollar mark.

That 8% stake could be worth over a hundred billion dollars after the IPO!

However, during the FTX bankruptcy liquidation, this stake was ultimately auctioned off at an estimated valuation of about $884 million.

Our memory of SBF mostly freezes on that photo of him sitting in court: messy curly hair, a loose T-shirt, a look of confusion as if he doesn’t understand what he did wrong.

But before that, he was someone else.

SBF and Effective Altruism

Besides being a crypto big shot, SBF was also one of the representative figures of Effective Altruism (EA).

The core logic of EA is simple: doing good can’t rely solely on passion; it must consider the input-output ratio — using the same resources, as much as possible, to reduce suffering and create good.

SBF’s life motto was: first, make as much money as possible, then invest it in places that can create the greatest good.

Anthropic happens to be the perfect embodiment of this logic.

Dario Amodei, along with a team of researchers who left OpenAI, founded Anthropic, with the core mission of “building powerful AI under safe conditions” — which is almost the standard answer to AI risk concerns within the EA community. SBF’s investment in Anthropic was not just a financial move; within his narrative framework, it was an effective action to leverage capital for humanity’s future safety.

He’s not a gambler; he’s a believer.

In that era, AI circles mainly embraced EA as mainstream thought. Safety, alignment, slow and cautious technological development — these were the political correctness among Silicon Valley tech elites. SBF, Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn — these people supported this narrative with real money.

Chain reaction after FTX’s collapse

Then, in November 2022, FTX collapsed.

SBF went to jail, but it wasn’t just him taken away.

He took away the voice of EA in Silicon Valley.

The core logic of EA is: the purpose can justify the means, as long as the final “good” is big enough.

This logic was pushed to the extreme by SBF — misappropriating customer assets for investments, because if the investments succeed, more good can be done.

In court, his defense team even tried to use Anthropic’s growth to justify his “foresight.”

But the prosecutor rebutted in court: Stealing money to invest, even if profitable, is still theft.

That statement is correct. Legally, it’s airtight.

But after the SBF case, the entire ideological system of EA faced a systematic purge in public opinion. The label “Effective Altruist” shifted from an elite identity to a kind of mockery symbol. Cautious, safety-oriented, alignment-focused — these groups lost their moral high ground.

Meanwhile, another group quietly stepped into the spotlight.

Tech accelerationism (e/acc) — regardless of safety, just run first, evolution will sort out the answers — began to become the new Silicon Valley faith.

Marc Andreessen and those who believe “growth itself is good” rebuilt the discourse on the ruins of EA.

And FTX owed users only $11.2 billion, but the bankruptcy team actually recovered $15 billion…

If not for the reckless operations of the bankruptcy team, SBF’s assets could easily have exceeded a trillion dollars!

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