It's pretty sad that Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Sequoia etc. are the ones who capture all of this growth and not the public, as would have been the case in the previous generation.
So if you know an index buyer who takes satisfaction in staying above fooled-by-randomness active traders, remind them that that they are now the designated unload zone for shares the privates don't want anymore.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that
Is it more than a rounding error amongst ALL (active/passive) traders?
This means companies stay private and keep getting private capital/investments (the flip side being private equity in the pre-IPO company) and typically an IPO is really existing shareholders realizing their investment.
So Amazon, Microsoft were forced to go public much earlier, then had their growth. Anthropic has already had growth, Claude AI is well known at this point, and after IPO there may not be as much growth after. In fact, the stock might go down because they have to report their full financials.
the public could buy google, m$, nvidia and so on and benefit from that growth, no?
Three of those four are public companies, so the public can absolutely participate.
On the one hand you'll never see a 100x return – that's been captured by private equity. But there's still a lot of long-term risk because these companies haven't proven they can deliver free cash flow to justify their valuations. Investing in SpaceX or Anthropic at $1T valuation is very different from investing in Apple or Nvidia.
The average investor has been lulled into feeling the index is riskless.
I suggest everyone to find a video online by their choice of podcaster interviewing Mike Green to learn more
Active investors usually fall into the same fallacy where people all rate themselves as above average. Mathematically speaking a large portion of active investors have to do worse than average and simply stating FUD about averages won’t change that
People need to go to jail this time.
We put Capone away on tax evasion. Get creative.
Playing the stock market is a loosing game. It is gambling where all the rules and all the odds are stacked in favor of a handful of people who gamble for a living. (it is also systemic exploitation of the working classes; so if you are into worker solidarity [you should] you should not partake in said exploitation).
If you just buy and hold, and don't panic sell during a recession, you'll win.
Will other more sophisticated players make money exploiting short-term swings? Sure. Will other players beat your returns? Also yes.
But that money isn't coming out of your pocket, so why does it matter? You're still beating leaving your money in a savings account, where inflation is outpacing interest.
Indeed. And yet opting out is an even bigger loss.
But, as they say, bears sound smart, bulls make money.
30% is much higher than 4-5%, but it's still much lower than most public companies (~80%)
Given gov currently spends 1T annually on servicing debt, I expect US is forced to print money and increase inflation for a long time.
Not if open weight models turn inference into a commodity that's sold at cost.
There will be, as is always the case, some amount of new labour skills that emerge and I can't say for sure what percentage or amount that might be.
Looking at tech work being increasingly well the last 20-30y, we can imagine new ways of working might be pretty valued.
The term singularity is worn out, but the physics parallel is quite apt - a point where the known gears of economics stop working, and it's unknowable what's there until you get there.
Maybe I’m naive but I expect any kind of “we’re just taking over the world now” event with any AI company will be met with enough resistance from 99.99999% of the world’s population that they’ll have to make it a sweet deal for us if they want to survive.
Now there will be bargaining friction given that any power sharing agreement with Anthropic will likely increase their future capacity and thus the future expected balance of power, but maybe AI has a long enough utility horizon that we should all expect to be dead by the time it realizes the long-term expectation advantage
The "dark-enlightenment" billionaires have been planning for a "collapse" for years, and their plans involve bunkers, acquiring citizenship in remote places, pervasive surveillance and armed dogbots/drones, the last 2 powered by AI, naturally.
Altman already has a couple I think.
Thiel has gone to Argentina but has a backup in New Zealand (w/ Citizenship).
Zuckerberg just bought an Irish castle (a Medieval bunker of sorts) but probably has others.
Musk probably has plans for a Moon bunker complete with Pleasure-Dome. Investor funded of course. Not sure how cosmic rays affect sperm however.
Brin couild opt for Blimps - imagine floating above the reeks and the wrecks like a Meth from Altered Carbon.
Bezos - does he have a bunker?
If they aren't patrolled by giant, iris-scanning eyeballs he's missed out on a vertical.
Maybe these sociopaths should try to save the world rather than making fantasy hedges against its collapse (while actively making things worse).
You can pack enough to survive for decades in that bunker, and then see how world will look like. If you are superrich, it is dumb to not take this chance.
> Maybe these sociopaths should try to save the world rather than making fantasy hedges against its collapse (while actively making things worse).
Its very loaded topic. There are other competing sociopaths, and also 8B of population who don't care about saving world much. But both goals(bunker and saving the world) could be tried simultaniously.
These billionaire nerds got lucky, but now think themselves as natural-born leaders — as evidenced by their wealth, but they wouldn't survive the post apocalypse.
If society collapses, and you were an elite ex-special forces armed detail on a billionaire's security team, would you continue to accept their now-worthless dollars, or would you or just take a fully-stocked bunker for you and yours?
Remember there are effectively no cops or courts in this world that would stand in the way of the (former) billionaires from being demoted to farm-hand by those with the guns.
Consequences from the aforementioned functioning society that would have collapsed in the billionaire's dystopian survival fantasy.
Also, soldiers running amok in rhe absence of a strong government happens in our world - ask any civilian who's been caught up in an insurgency, or look at places like the Democratic Republic of Congo where armed militias run fiefs, and you have to pay tribute to operate a cobalt or lithium mine "their" area.
It seems a lot of the bunkerbros don't realize this value of society. They don't need society any more, they think.
Emphasis being survive. Maybe. These morons seem to think this will be a continuation of their current lives. That somehow people will continue to serve them if society has collapsed. They're delusional.
> There are other competing sociopaths, and also 8B of population who don't care about saving world much.
Oh please! The billionaires think that they're so special, they owe their fortune to their inherent genius. But when it comes to helping the world it's apparently "but but the other 8B aren't doing it, I'm just a regular guy who can't accomplish anything!"
Losers.
This isn't just an Anthropic issue, but more and more of the upside of companies have been captured in private markets prior to IPO for around the last decade. This is a consequence of so much money floating around, that IPOing is now the last stop on the train instead of one of the early/middle stops where a company actually needs to raise money.
IPO returns have been horrible for years. Past 5 year returns on S&P is ~80%, on NASDAQ 100 about 100% while IPO's have returned 10-15%.
Biotech IPOs are even worse. There are 5-year segments where only about 1 in 40 biotech & pharmaceutical IPOs trade above their IPO price at expiry.
On the flip side, in biotech, biopharma and SaaS, 2025 IPOs had nearly 10x the valuations of 2015 IPOs. So you may trade below expiry, but the structure of the earlier deals you participated in, you make way more money anyway.
I didn't buy Amazon in the early '00s for this reason, and I won't buy Anthropic for this reason. Maybe I lose out, but I like to invest in stocks that look like good investments.
At the time, I didn't know whether or not they would become the biggest, most important company in the world. They did in the end, but if you live your life betting on every company whose valuation depends on them becoming the biggest, most important company in the world, you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm old enough to remember when IPO's existed to generate equity financing for growing companies. Now they exist to facilitate exit liquidity for mature companies, but a two decades of near-zero interest rates and enough inflation and wealth consolidation to make the "qualified investor" requirements trivial will do that. We're living in the days of the pink sheets again, where you really have to invest in small companies with very little reporting on them, but you already have to be wealthy to have access to those investments.
Your argument that it's overvalued isn't really tethered to anything. It's about as whimsicle as the people saying "well it's worth any price because AI is the future." Of course the price matters.
Here is some way to start thinking about it. A lot of mature companies trade at 20-25x times earnings. So $2T needs roughly $80–100B a year in profit eventually. At 25–30% net margin, it means about $300–400B in revenue (something like Microsoft). Or 20%/450B (Google) or 10%/800B (Amazon). Anthropic is still growing rapidly. And intuitively i don't think it's crazy to suggest they may look like one of the current big tech companies in the future.
>Regardless of anything else that valuation is basically saying all their growth has been captured, unless they literally take over
Absolutely not. Not even close to true. They dont even need to become the biggest company.
Honestly, in a company that isn't returning capital to shareholders, I don't see the point if it's a company that isn't somehow subject to a potential acquisition. If you don't have a path to monetize your stake, why buy it? These days, just vibes. TSLA and SPCX might as well just be another crypto like Bitcoin
> Speaking at the 2026 Per Jacobsson Foundation Lecture during the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, Clark pointed to an extreme economic scenario modeled by Anthropic economists in which U.S. GDP could reach roughly $44 trillion by 2030, which is a nearly 50% increase from the current $30.77 trillion in just four years.
If the total value of US public companies also increased by 50% in that time, they'd collectively be worth about $112T. I guess Anthropic could be worth 10% of that in some scenario? And if we're in that world probably capital has increased a lot faster than labor so US public companies could be worth like 150T or something. Who knows. Nothing about valuations makes sense any more, so what's one more drop in the nonsense bucket.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-c...
I'll write a song for you and sell it to you for $5 trillion dollars and you pay me with a $5 trillion painting.
The number might be too high, but doesn't take more than a little imagination and some basic facts about the world to see how it could be worth 20 trillion in 10 years.
Einstein once said “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.” It’s very hard for humans to comprehend compounding returns.
For Anthropic to show similar returns over 29 years, it would be valued at many times the current total market cap of the S&P 500. At Amazon’s current value after 29 years of growth, its market capitalization is about 1/3 the total market cap of the S&P 500 at the of 1997.
It’s quite hard to justify that in terms of future cash flows. At even a quadrillion dollar valuation and a 20x revenue multiplier, they’d need $50 trillion in revenue… or roughly 1.5 quarters of current US GDP.
So while mathematically possible, it’s quite improbable.
"There isn't a mathematical reason Anthropic can't be worth 165x the actual US GDP by 2056".
Amazon would have gotten you rich, but it wasn't there when it IPOed. Anthropic is growing fast, at 4.7B, 11.6B and 16.7B last 3 quarters.
I think people want to believe that AI will be both productive and replace traditional search / ad revenue, which would give it a solid standing for valuation...
Back in 2018, I sold a bunch of Nvidia stock. I had bought it in 2014, when deep learning was taking off, and it had gone up 10x since then. It was obvious that all the growth had been captured and it was time to get out. I remember feeling pretty smug about timing things just right.
Nvidia's market cap in 2018 was around $150B, and the largest company in the world was Apple at ~$800B. And part of my thinking at the time was, well... Nvidia is already worth about a fifth of the most valuable company in the world. How much can they reasonably grow from this valuation?
In hindsight, I can tell you: the answer is 35x (as of now, and who knows in the future). The idea that any company, much less Nvidia, would be worth $5T within a decade was laughable back then, and yet, here we are.
If ANT lists at 5% of the US GDP and goes up 35x, it'd be worth 175% of the current US GDP.
Except in some hyperinflation scenario, I don't see how that makes any sense.
The thesis here is that in the past short sellers would short sell overvalued stocks in the index and buy undervalued stocks and drive price discovery and that those mechanisms are broken due to:
- Passive index funds dominate the market and swamp the ability of active traders to drive price discovery
- Massive returns of these funds over the last 15 years have made beating the benchmarks difficult and leading investors away from actively managed portfolios
- The rise of meme stocks, options trading and crypto bro traders driving out hedge funds and institutional short sellers - Stock tickers and crypto being seen as disconnecting from the US Treasury’s as an anchor for risk free returns to a “Snow Crash” model where assets represent a stake in a new world order.
in 2016, who would've thought this kind of growth...
Besides the financials I do think there is merit to consider what you do as an investor. You make it easier for the company you invest in to access capital and in such a capex heavy world that is actually meaningfull. So if you believe anthropic is creating more long term benefit for the world than say Google, you might want to buy regardless of direct financial expectation.
Only the investment management business cares about alpha.
Individuals pick stocks because they believe they can generate the greatest absolute returns.
You live in dream land if you think the average trader even knows what cost of equity is.
Put another way, the risk has to be worth the potential reward - expecting Amazon-like returns might be unrealistic, but what level of returns would be necessary to counteract the amount of risk you're taking on if you buy Anthropic stock? And what kind of valuation would Anthropic have to reach for that to be possible?
If I expect Anthropic to perform as well as the market, I can lower my risk substantially and see a lot of its upside with the right mix of ETFs. It doesn’t make sense to take on all that risk if I have a much less risky path to the upside. On the other hand, if I expect it to outperform the market, it might fit in my high risk bucket. So from the perspective of individual investors, it’s about matching risk levels and returns.
Bahhaa. I love it when a normal guy just exposes the issue. Yes. 10 trillion is getting close to us GDP lol.
Anthropic growth rate is truly unprecedented at it's scale.
They are 10x revenue YoY.
2024: ~$0.4B
2025: ~$4.0B
2026: ~$100.0B
2025: $0.50 revenue per $1.00 of compute
2026: $1.82 revenue per $1.00 of computeValutions are a function of cash flows, growth of those cash flows and risk. Don’t forget to discount properly on your way out.
At $2T Anthropic would need to look roughly like Alphabet today by 2030 for investors to earn a normal market return (20-25X earnings). That or similar baselines should be the basis of discussion, not if AI is overhyped, if it will grow faster than Amazon did, oligarchy(?), etc.
Unless you have special insight, you should assume all stocks are equally good buys.
There's not going to be an IPO at a price where everyone agree that it'll see a 30% growth over 30 years. Obviously that'd be priced in.
Lol maddest thing I've read all day
"priced in"
I smell your efficient market hypothesis argument, before you even begin just keep in mind that does not apply here, it's an IPO, the price is not set by the secondary market
Even so, I'm not a fan of EMH
> Lol maddest thing I've read all day
didn't someone like the WSJ to a long term experiment picking a basket of stocks by throwing darts at the paper? They beat most/all established funds over 5 years or something like that. I don't think it matter much, i just buy VOO when i get my bonus and go back to living my life. That strategy is on track to put two kids through college.
Regarding the stock picking experiment, yes, there have been many similar experiments. The premise is just pick a random basket of stocks and see how it performs over decades. Indeed those have outperformed cap-weighted the indexes, most of the time.
How? If you pick a random basket of stocks, you'll end up with mostly small-cap stocks. Cap-weighted indexes are heavily driven by a few large stocks. Most years, small-cap outperforms large-cap (Fama-French 5-factor model[1]). So the "monkey picks stocks" experiment is actually just an exercise in harvesting what is called the "size premium".
Since the AI boom, large-cap has been significantly outperforming small-cap, so if you run the same "monkey picks stocks" experiment, it would likely underperform most of the time.
If you want to easily visualize this, just go on TradingView and compare SPY (cap-weighted S&500) with RSP (equal-weighted S&P500).
[1] https://www.quantt.co.uk/resources/fama-french-model-explain...
Almost like a "Veblen good" type investment.
They basically have to price it at an unreasonable valuation so that people curse them while they take it. There's no way around it.
There's a good reason IPOs are shown to underperform the market
Yes, lots of downsides on this one, but people see it as a call option on a future where AI replaces all jobs, what would you pay for that? A rational response from someone that accepts the premise of the question is likely "anything"
Well, priced into the IPO price by Antrophic. It was you who said it would be priced into the IPO at launch, I just used the same terminology you did: "There's not going to be an IPO at a price where everyone agree that it'll see a 30% growth over 30 years. Obviously that'd be priced in."
If you don't think one should assume the market's expectations of future results are accurately priced into the IPO price, it's an argument in favour of the comment you tried to argue against, not contrary to it.
> Yes, lots of downsides on this one, but people see it as a call option on a future where AI replaces all jobs, what would you pay for that? A rational response from someone that accepts the premise of the question is likely "anything"
Even if you buy that premise, there are more premises needed. First (1) AI replaces all jobs, then (2) private AI models will be able to convert it into profit without being contested by open models, razor thin margins due to competition, regulation/nationalisation, or general societal upheaval, finally (3) Antrophic specifically will "win the race" and capture the lion's share of that market.
That being said, I would not bet any money on the stock losing value in any reasonable time frame either. It's enough to take a quick look at Tesla to see that fundamentals or actual results does not necessarily matter for a hyped sci-fi stock, even in the long term.
If that's what you think "priced in" means, I've a brand new company with a 1 trillion $ valuation priced in, would you like to buy some shares from me?
> It was you who said it would be priced into the IPO at launch
I actually said in my initial comment that the "priced in" argument is not even worth invoking, but here we are.
> If you don't think one should assume the market's expectations of future results are accurately priced into the IPO price, it's an argument in favour of the comment you tried to argue against, not contrary to it.
The comment I answered to initially said "Unless you have special insight, you should assume all stocks are equally good buys.", written by someone else. To which I replied "I smell your efficient market hypothesis argument, before you even begin just keep in mind that does not apply here, it's an IPO, the price is not set by the secondary market"
> (2) private AI models will be able to convert it into profit without being contested from open models, razor thin margins due to competition, regulation/nationalisation, or general societal upheaval, finally (3) Antrophic specifically will "win the race" and capture the lion's share of that market.
Very good arguments
So, a future where there is no market can only be a future where humans are extinct, in my opinion (some form of communism won't work)
If someone believes markets will still exist (one form or another) and there will still be exchanges of value between people, even in the most maximalist AI future - then I think it becomes rational for said person to seriously consider buying AI labs, even at stupid valuations
Admittedly I've formulated my previous comment wrong, I should've written "a future where AI has the potential to fulfill all jobs known today", instead of "a future where AI replaces all jobs"
As mentioned in other comments, I'm not trying to convince anyone to do anything, I'm here just to argue different points and positions
But in the past, rules & regulations basically forced companies to IPO at a certain size. This meant that when they IPO'd, there was still growth upside.
Those rules are gone now, so they can stay private and have all the growth happen privately. When they IPO now, it's more just an exit. The growth was captured by insiders only.
If it was really "just an exit", people wouldn't buy the IPO and it would flop
Of course people believe there is room for more growth, that's why they are buying it
Even in this thread you can see people (not me) arguing that the IPO is too cheap and it's easily worth 3 trillion $ like numbers mean nothing
Sometimes, there is no logic behind what people do, ultimately hoping to strike gold once while wasting money otherwise.
Also rare for an IPO, I assume.