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points by kmac_ 3 days ago | 0 comments

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).

[–] kinnth 3 days ago

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

[–] JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

> 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

[–] extraextra 3 days ago

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

[–] ygghutttff 3 days ago

Correct does that poster actually know what comparables are?

Comparables are not by peer group or sector.

It’s cash flows, growth and risk bud. If you want to do peer group - go ahead - just don’t forget to control for differences..

Price to sales multiples are internally inconsistent by definition.

[–] JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

Is there an internet rule for folks asking if someone else knows something following it with a completely wrong definition of that thing?

[–] solyin 2 days ago

It happens so often that it's an Internet meme with its own subreddit by this point.

No You're Thinking Of.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NYTO/

[–] runako 3 days ago

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.

[–] extraextra 3 days ago

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.

[–] runako 3 days ago

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.

[–] extraextra 3 days ago

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...

[–] runako 3 days ago

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.

[–] xvector 3 days ago

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

[–] extraextra 3 days ago

Hahaha

Someone on a different forum fed the S-1 in Fable and it said "Shows a massive “loss” on paper, but that’s mostly an accounting effect from the company’s value going up"

Funniest shit I've read all day

[–] lotsofpulp 3 days ago

>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.

[–] somenameforme 2 days ago

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.

[–] foobiekr 3 days ago

What fraction of coding opex do they need to capture to justify this, whether they got it right or not?

[–] Quothling 3 days ago

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.