runako

The good news is the US has seen similar economic consolidation in the past, and passed laws to rebalance the economy accordingly.

The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.

What does this add to a discussion of a change in colorectal cancer rates?

One thing I learned about colonoscopy is that it is not _only_ a test. I understand that the removal of polyps is a cancer-reducing mechanism in addition to being a diagnostic. Less invasive tests do not have this property.

> You are benchmarking against an outlier stock with a cult following (Elon Musk) and diversified sources of revenue

So in this case, diversified revenue is a drag on SpaceX because all the non-AI revenue is growing considerably slower.

But your point about Musk is taken. Cerebras went out in May, and despite being a hardware company is trading at 37x sales. Palantir trades at 78x, CrowdStrike at 50x, Cloudflare at 47x, etc. Anthropic is growing significantly faster than any of those companies. I'm not making the case that Anthropic will/should trade at any of those, just that Anthropic trading in the range of the P/S of SpaceX would not be crazy, and it would not require Musk to be involved.

> A valuation based on comparisons has to have more than 1 peer to compare against

Yes, the best peers are "public pure play frontier model providers trading in the US." There are none. SpaceX is closest, despite not really being a frontier provider and definitely not a pure play. But you are correct that investors will use a basket of stocks. It is silly to suggest SpaceX will not be in that basket.

You absolutely can make an AI doomer basket to model Anthropic. Use "real infrastructure companies" as the connective tissue since AI wants to be infra. In your basket put Caterpillar, Kroger, The Southern Company, AT&T, Comcast, and ExxonMobil. You can absolutely make the argument that Anthropic should trade more like them than like CrowdStrike or Cloudflare, that is a coherent position. Then based on that infra peer group, calculate a valuation. I think this model will be much less accurate in the near term than a model that uses other high-growth tech companies.

Price discovery is part of the fun of IPOs! The doomer model could be right, the stock value could collapse toward irrelevance as fast as the exchange's circuit breakers will allow!

I mean, yes. You are raising points, using Wall Street lingo, that are rightfully raised about every IPO, ever.

To be clear: I do not have a financial interest in this, and will not be buying the IPO. I very much am just describing the world as it is.

> Some people will benchmark Anthropic vs. SpaceX, that doesn't make it a smart approach.

Yeah, I would not pay 62x sales for SpaceX. And I don't buy IPOs. I'm not endorsing these values, I am saying benchmarking against peers is what investors commonly do.

> A normal thing is to consider risk, liabilities, cashflow, how diversified revenue streams are etc., and other things which you seem to be missing.

I'm not missing those things, I am not including them here because being "right" is rarely how markets value companies. (Also because the rest of that stuff is in the S-1.)

It's possible to build a "correct" model of a high-growth high-tech company that looks primarily at risk, liabilities, cashflow, and diversity of revenue streams. That model might put Anthropic at (say) a $100B valuation. That "correct" model is going to be less predictive than a model that starts from what similar firms are trading at in public markets. I personally am more interested in predictive power than correctness when evaluating stocks.

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.

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.

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.

This is so important in analyzing these commitments. Anthropic's commitments will make them a Top 10 customer at many of their vendors. (Even at Google/Amazon, how many other customers do they have with $100B+ committed?)

Those vendors would very much like to retain as much of that business as possible. If the space goes sideways, I would very much expect some kind of renegotiation/work out.

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Say more about that? The economics look better than I was expecting.

Inclusion of SAFEs makes this IMHO the most plausible explanation.

I do not expect to find that Anthropic invested enough in the SAFEs of other companies to lose $80B on their investments.

Estimates have their annualized revenue in the range of $150m. Anthropic alone takes ~ two days to do that revenue.

OpenRouter is not a useful signal.