Comment by tolugenius
5 hours ago
> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time"
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.
The "valuation" is based on market capitalization, so the market "supports" it because of the mass hysteria of "perceived value." When a big IPO gets automatically added to a major stock index (such as NASDAQ or S&P 500), all the mutual funds which include holdings that mirror the indexes will automatically buy and hold shares. Lots of employee 401k money and pension fund investments are supporting the mutual funds, which are perceived as "safe."
To put it in fewer words; the stock market is rigged.
A $2tn IPO does mean $2tn materialized out of nowhere. What matters is how big the liquid market is, and that is a much smaller number.
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations
Suppose there are 100 million jobs that can benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. At a conservative 30% margin and subtracting $100 billion for expenses that's $200 billion in annual profits, which can easily support a $5T market cap. And that's just scaling up today's use cases, not even considering the possibility of labs having their secret internal models doing drug discovery or quant trading or other profitable hobbies.
100 million jobs is an insane number.
Apple has a $4.5 trillion valuation, and it just makes pretty consumer widgets. The global B2B economy is massive.
Well, if Anthropic actually makes $200B revenue in 2028 then that valuation is justified, depending on how fat their margins are.
They are going to have to monetize their customers to try to reach that goal. So that means charging as much as the market can handle. They have a couple of problems though called OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, Chinese models and Open weights.
With the (unknown?) blend of consumer vs enterprise customers, what do "experts" project their margins to be around?
Some notes from me researching trying to answer my own question:
> Wall Street experts and financial research firms project Anthropic’s current blended gross margins to be in the mid-40% to mid-60% range, with internal company forecasts aiming for a software-like 77% gross margin by 2028
> Anthropic’s revenue is heavily dominated by enterprise and developer customers (roughly 75% to 85% of total revenue).
> Premium Token Pricing: Enterprise and API clients generate 3 to 5 times more revenue per token than consumer users.
Net is estimated to be between 10% and 30%