Did Alameda Invest in Elon Musk’s SpaceX?

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of now-bankrupt FTX has always dodged the question of why FTX used investor money to support Alameda. However, SBF chose to ignore the question and instead said that he made the decision to stay out of Alameda’s trading and risk management and hence was unaware of the company’s dire situation.

The information in a recent report by Financial Times might shed light on what might have happened to the funds and where all the missing money went, a question that SBF avoided answering time and time again in interviews.

The distributed group of about 500 illiquid investments is held by ten holding organizations. Furthermore, the data show that the total investment value exceeds $5.4 billion. Alameda Research has made investments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boring Company, as well as companies like Sequoia Capital and Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital. Genesis, a cryptocurrency miner, and Anthropic, a company that conducts artificial intelligence research, both received investments from Alameda Research’s private equity portfolio.

The Excel spreadsheet from early November, when SBF was looking for rescue funding due to a run on FTX customer deposits. 

The majority of Alameda’s remaining investments are in crypto and DeFi projects. A fertility clinic, a manufacturer of military drones, a vertical farming company, various start-up video game studios, betting platforms, online banks, publishers, and more are all on the list.

In 2019, SBF founded FTX and gave Ellison and Trabucco control of Alameda. They created a quantitative trading company that generated $3–4 million per day, earning them a spot on Forbes’ list of the “30 under 30”.

These funds were used to purchase blockchain platforms. However, after a leveraged trade on the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange went wrong at the beginning of last year, Alameda Research took the brunt of a $1 billion loss incurred by its affiliated company FTX.