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> 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

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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.
Sure, you can throw any numbers around, if you wish to get any valuation you want.

In reality, a valuation based on revenue (sales) is bonkers to begin with, but even worse when you consider that Anthropic has so much debt that it doesn't have positive equity value, it's in a deficit ("When liabilities attached to an asset exceed its value, the difference is called a deficit and the asset is informally said to be "underwater" or "upside-down""). At least SpaceX has more assets than liabilities.

There are a set of mistakes in what you wrote, but

> SpaceX has more assets than liabilities.

is definitely a choice thing to write on the day SpaceX announced a $40B debt deal to purchase compute to run other companies' models. Based on available information, this will put SpaceX into a place where it has more liabilities than assets.

Lol

You're speculating what SpaceX balance sheet might be, like they haven't just released MRQ earnings report last week

Just go read it and you'll see you're wrong even after you subtract that 40 billion SPV https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

Fair, I misread the filing.

Larger point stands. SpaceX is commanding a 62x sales multiple, whether or not you personally believe price:sales should be relevant. SpaceX's AI operation is smaller and growing slower than Anthropic's. It's reasonable to expect investors to benchmark Anthropic against SpaceX, it would be silly not to do so. A normal thing one would expect investors to do is assign a higher multiple to a company that grows faster.

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If your hyper growth startup does not have more liabilities than assets, it has fucked up.
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