Today, SpaceX officially bought Cursor — the AI startup for programmers — for $60 billion.
And now for the really interesting part.
In April 2022, one person invested just $200,000 into this company and received a 5% stake. Today, that share would be worth about $3 billion. Fifteen thousand times more.
That person's name is Sam Bankman-Fried. The very same founder of FTX, who is now serving 25 years in an American prison.
And Cursor is only the tip of the iceberg. Through his fund, he also managed to get into Anthropic for half a billion dollars, into Robinhood, and into SpaceX exposure. If he had held all of that today — he would be in the top twenty richest people on the planet.
But he didn't hold it. The bankruptcy trustee sold the Cursor stake for exactly the same $200,000 that was originally invested. At cost. Meanwhile, SBF is serving out his sentence and reading the news about how his missed billions are growing without him.
Why did it turn out this way? Very simply. Greed.
The guy was a brilliant venture investor — there are only a handful like him on the planet. But he wasn't satisfied. He started playing with client money in the crypto markets, took on too much leverage, got caught — and had to fire-sell everything.
You know why this story personally gets to me? Because greed doesn't distinguish between geniuses and ordinary people. In 2021, my portfolio grew to $149,000. And then the hype around StepN started. All the bloggers were writing about it, everyone was pooling money together. Back then, I didn't look deeply enough at market cycles. I gave in. I threw $20,000 into sneakers and GMT tokens.
Then everything crashed. The money evaporated. At the very peak of the cycle, at the fattest point — I couldn't hold back and I lost it.
The only difference between me and SBF is the scale. The mechanics are the same. Greed whispers the same thing into the ear of a billionaire and a beginner trader alike.
So here is a lesson worth billions.
Knowledge won't save you. Genius won't save you. Past winning trades won't save you. Only discipline saves you — that boring word everyone hates.
You can be the best venture investor of the decade and end up in prison. You can be sitting on a $149,000 profit and blow it all on a hype wave. If you break the basic rules — the market and reality will take it all back. With interest.
The cycle will sort everything out. Always.
