FTX Bankruptcy Claims Surge
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A story about how Scott Galloway made a profitable investment by buying FTX bankruptcy claims when others were fearful.
"Scott Galloway had this quote where he said 'when I see fire, I run towards it' because he's seen enough bankruptcies to know there's opportunity. He reads the paperwork about the FTX bankruptcy and notices something interesting about Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF).
Unlike typical schemes where money is spent on luxuries, SBF was a degenerate about venture investing. One of his big investments was $500 million in Anthropic, one of the top AI companies. Scott did the math and thought Anthropic would raise money at much higher valuations in the future.
Because of this, Scott bought FTX bankruptcy claims at 20 cents on the dollar. He figured he could triple or quadruple his money based on the venture returns alone, not counting any recovered crypto. As it turned out, Bitcoin exploded in value and they were able to claw back a lot of money.
The final result was that FTX victims ended up getting about 125% of their money back. Scott specifically bought a $1 million claim for $250,000 and sold it for 90% of the million, effectively tripling his money."
[Note: Shaan later corrected that the Anthropic stake was actually sold for around $800-900 million in liquidation, and Scott's investment thesis about Anthropic's value was wrong, though he still ended up profitable for different reasons.]
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.