A viral narrative on social media last week casts Sam Bankman-Fried as “a genius at picking generational winners.” The figures cited are eye-catching. An 8% stake in Anthropic, acquired for $500 million, is now said to be worth over $30 billion.
A $200,000 investment in a tiny AI startup, Cursor, is framed as having grown into a multibillion-dollar stake. Add in Solana, SpaceX, and Robinhood. The posts tally it all up to $114 billion the FTX bankruptcy estate supposedly left on the table by selling too early. The conclusion: Bankman-Fried was a visionary, but was undone by panicked lawyers.
The framing, however, rests on a set of assumptions that merit closer scrutiny.
It begins with a familiar belief among retail investors: the hard part of investing is picking what to buy. In practice, the more difficult task is holding on. Bankman-Fried, for reasons that have nothing to do with luck or skill, was structurally incapable of holding.
Long-term wealth creation depends less on entry points and more on the ability to stay invested through volatility. Every dollar that went into Anthropic and Cursor, and the rest, was customer money that Bankman-Fried had no right to invest.
Now think about what holding actually requires. When Anthropic's valuation wobbled, when Solana crashed from $260 to $8, when Cursor was a four-person outfit with no revenue, staying invested through all of that demanded something specific – legitimate ownership. Capital that no one can force you to liquidate. Patience that comes from knowing the money is yours, and that no one will knock on your door and demand it back.
Bankman-Fried had none of that. The FTX estate did not sell those assets at the bottom because the lawyers were stupid. They sold because they had to. When you steal billions from customers, the court will, quite rightly, seize your assets and convert them to cash to repay the people you robbed. The estate eventually recovered $18 billion and repaid creditors with interest. That is the system working as designed.
Fraud destroys holding power, which is the only thing in investing that actually matters in the end. Warren Buffett has said, in various ways over the decades, that the stock market transfers money from the impatient to the patient. But patience is not a personality trait you can summon at will. You can only be patient if your capital is legitimately yours, your time horizon is genuinely long, and no one has the legal authority to force you out.
Biased narrative
The second flaw in the "Bankman-Fried was a genius" narrative is biased. We see the Anthropics and the Cursors. We do not see the dozens of other bets Alameda made that went to zero, because nobody writes viral threads about those. Investing misappropriated money across a hundred venture bets and then cherry-picking the winners in hindsight is not genius. It is a lottery ticket bought with someone else's money.
There is an Indian parallel worth drawing, even if it sounds unglamorous. The investor who started a ₹10,000 monthly systematic investment plan (SIP) into a diversified equity fund in 2008 has lived through the global financial crisis, demonetisation, the rollout of goods and services tax, the 2020 covid crash, and every panic in between. The outcomes may not produce headline-grabbing multiples, but they are built on continuity of ownership and the absence of forced exits.
No court can seize this investor's wealth. No margin call can force her out. No bankruptcy estate will be liquidating her holdings on the worst possible day. That structural certainty, dull as it is, is what compounds over the decades.
You do not need to pick the next Cursor. You need to invest money that is honestly yours, in things you understand, and then do nothing for a very long time.
Legitimate capital, patiently held, is the only edge in this business that has worked reliably for a hundred years. It is not glamorous enough to go viral. But it is the only version of the story that ends with you still holding the asset.
Dhirendra Kumar is founder and chief executive officer of Value Research, an indpendent investment advisory firm. Views are personal