If you could go back in time and buy $1000 worth of Amazon when they IPO'd, it would be worth 3.3 million today. Because Amazon's stock value has grown on average 30% year over year for 30 years. Amazon's valuation when they went public was around 400 million.
How much can Anthropic reasonably grow from a 1.5 or 2 trillion dollar valuation? If we want them to grow even half as much as Amazon they'd have to be worth 5.9 quadrillion dollars by 2056. That's 5,900,000,000,000,000, a 16 digit number.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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...
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.