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by stephen_g 1046 days ago
Was it not as much 'worth tens of billions' as 'held tens of billions of customer funds' though?
3 comments

FTX supposedly had funding rounds that valued it at like $30B. This is equity, not deposits. Possibly massively overpriced due to crypto bubble, but likely that he could've extracted generational wealth from it.
I'd be shocked if they had any solid claim at even $1B using honest numbers. The crypto world loves to make valuations like “I just sold one to my buddy at $500, the other tokens are worth $45 trillion” but at the end of the day there just wasn't that much liquidity since most people aren't interested in the product. For a company like FTX which is getting fees from their customer's holdings that doesn't leave a lot of room for billions unless they could have cashed out at the peak of the bubble.
Or just settled for the generational wealth he'd get from his parents. You really had to try hard in this guy's position to not live a life of complete material ease, and he pulled it off!
Or stay at the hedge fund he was working at (Jane Street?) and make a fortune in bonuses! Dudebro really achieved something very few of us ever will.
What sort of funding rounds was Elizabeth Holmes getting again? What was the supposed value of twitter when Elon bought it?

Valuations don’t mean much until the money changes hands, typically with the asset holder losing.

In crypto, those two seem to mean the same thing. Three yards of ironclad terms of service inform customers that the deposited funds are fully and permanently the exchange's funny money
You say “in crypto” yet Bitcoin was invented to solve the problem you describe.
Then it failed spectacularly. How was FTX possible, if Bitcoin was invented to solve that problem?
How much are unicorns that never turn a profit worth?
Ask Amazon and YouTube for the first decade of their lives.

Short answer is they're (their stock is) worth as much as people are willing to pay.