PICKING WINNERS IS EASY. HOLDING ON TO THEM IS HARDER

A viral narrative on social media last week casts Sam Bank-man-Fried as “a genius at picking generational winners.”

- DHIRENDRA KUMAR

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 $II4 billion the FTX bankruptcy estate supposedly left on the table by selling too early. The conclusion: Bankman-Fried was avisionary, but was undone by panicked lawyers.

The framing, however, rests on aset of assumptions that merit closerscrutiny. Itbegins with a familiar beliefamong 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 havenothing to dowith luck orskill, wasstructurally incapable ofholding. Long-term wealth creation depends lesson entry pointsand 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.