The hardest part of investing isn’t picking, it’s holding
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.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
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