On the 7th of January 2023, Laurent Zeimes, a fund manager at Tachikoma, went on Twitter to share a hopium for FTX creditors about Sam’s stake in Antrophic.
This makes the FTX stake ~2.8b. Let's see
— 🔮 (@laurentzeimes) January 7, 2023
Since the crash of FTX global and the drama surrounding the indictment of its CEO, Sam Bankman-fried, creditors and users have been in a bad place when analyzing the result of their investment in the centralized exchange.
That’s why Laurent chose to share an update that would give FTX’s creditors hope or hopium. During the series B investment round conducted by the AI developing establishment, Antrophic, Sam utilized FTX to invest $500 million out of the $704 million total investment Anthrophic received from 2021 to date.
It was previously believed that Sam and FTX had more than 50% control over Anthrophic due to the investment size. But it was later discovered that Sam had around 14% share in the entity. Anthropic is currently valued at $20 billion, which would leave the value of FTX’s 14% stake in the company at about $2.8 billion. Thus providing yet another means of recovering their lost funds.
Even though some users view the post as a dose of hopium, others were quick to point out certain legal problems involved in liquidating the Anthropic asset. First, it would be difficult to liquidate based on the asset size, and it would take years to resolve that situation.
Additionally, Anthropic is an altruist entity registered as a public benefit corporation. Like C corporations, Public benefit corporations exist to provide a benefit for humanity, so they are legally protected from financial obligations to their investors and are taxed separately. This reduces the options available for liquidating the asset as Anthropic has more legal protection.
Given a situation where providing a positive impact were to come into conflict with their financial obligation, they would win on the grounds of the former. Thus whatever is going to happen to the now $2.8 billion shares would depend on Anthropic’s documented agreement which is not available to the public.
There could be added limitations like the type of shares, the extent of liquidation possible, and to who they are allowed to sell the shares. It’s also possible that the shares are held by SBF alone, not FTX. Thus, The FTX estate/bankruptcy trustee would have to prove they can reach SBF’s personal assets first, which could complicate things.
