Comment by kmac_
1 day ago
Yeah, it's a crazy number, but they got the AI business right, just like Google got internet marketing right 25 years ago, as long as they keep the momentum (and prices).
1 day ago
Yeah, it's a crazy number, but they got the AI business right, just like Google got internet marketing right 25 years ago, as long as they keep the momentum (and prices).
Isn't the issue tho, that google launched at i dunno a 1bn market cap and grew as the internet grew.
what you're buying into here is a company that is already large on the idea of growth over the next 10 years.
Modern IPO's just reek of investors cashing out
> google launched at i dunno a 1bn market cap and grew as the internet grew
Google closed its first trading day "worth more than $25 billion" [1] with $1.5bn revenues, up 234% from 2002's $440mm [2]. That's a 16x revenue multiple, 0.07 growth adjusted [3].
On a similar revenue multiple, Anthropic's $16.3bn half-year earnings are worth $543 billion. Adjust for Anthropic's 1,400% YoY growth and you're well over $3 trillion.
Obviously, it's a lot harder to grow at a thousand percent from a $16bn baseline versus a few billion. But purely on a multiple basis, Anthropic is in a similar ballpark as Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/technology/shares-of-goog...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pegratio.asp
If only it was that simple, to switch multiples around between random companies and come up with valuations
Google was profitable, free cash flow positive and had no debts basically
Anthropic is burning money by the millisecond, no profits, free cash flow negative and has lots of debts & commitments
3 replies →
As another check, SpaceX is trading at ~62x sales with a growth rate in the 30% range. Assigning the same sales multiple puts Anthropic at ~$2T market cap. Add in a factor for much faster growth (and non-GAAP profitability) and $3T is a really easy place to end up.
16 replies →
>Modern IPO's just reek of investors cashing out
99.9999% of the time someone sells something, the goal is to obtain cash. Throughout all of human history.
Stock markets made a whole lot more sense before the internet and broad interconnectivity. It was really only one of the reliable ways for companies to broadly raise money to grow and expand. Now everything just feels like a mixture of gambling and pump and dump.
Like is there going to be anybody, whatsoever, who's genuinely aiming to go long on Anthropic? It just feels like this massive collusion that 'everybody' is in on where we all know it's going to crater but the whole game is to pump it as much as possible and just try not to be the last guy holding the bag.
Obviously LLMs are going to revolutionize the world, and they arguably already have, but there are open weight models available for free with frontier level performance, and the price to run these models keeps plummeting which, in turn, is already driving token costs down. Like many things now a days, this is all highly entertaining, yet absolutely insane.
Did they get it right? I'm geniunly curious because from my point of view the only company to get AI right so far is Microsoft. This is from the point of view of an EU energy company married to Microsoft services mind you, but Microsoft is the only AI company which actually sells AI to us in a manner that can be considered useful. 7 months ago I thought Copilot (the m365 one, not the github one) was useless. Now I think the chat part is as good as what you'll get on the smaller subscriptions to ChatGPT or Claude, and it's Cowork is very good.
Obviously it's not like having Claude Code or similar, but those would be very hard to run legally and safely in EU regulated industries like us in energy production. You could run Codex but it would require your IT department to have yet another place to manage security and software integrations. Which is a fairly big issue when you have around 1 IT staff member per 300 employees, and an organisation which will buy five different sharepoint solutions for the same problem.
Microsoft sells something that seamlessly integrates into everything else you buy from them. It's easy to manage credit spending and when I say that I don't mean that it's easy to set it up. It's easy to track and budget so the right departments pay for it. It can read your emails, your onedrive, your loop, your sharepoint, your powerbi/fabric and anything else you have access to. Sure it's annoying to be confronted with a point you've made 7 months ago (like how you think Copilot is utter trash) and since changed opinions on it's frightingly good at finding relevant stuff, even in some obscoure legal document on your intranet.
I assume that Anthropic and OpenAI makes money of this somehow, but for the most parts our users wouldn't care if it was the GPT and Claude models or Mistral or Deepseek. Which is why I asked if they had really gotten it right.
What fraction of coding opex do they need to capture to justify this, whether they got it right or not?