Jason Cridge

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip: "My fundamental message to corporations is 'buyer beware' when you invest in BC, because we are not standing down, we are not stepping back."

BREAKING: FBI officially identifies North Korea as the perpetrator of the $6,000,000,000.00+ Binance heist.

JUST IN: Bill Ackman says Warren Buffett told him he hasn't taken water in 48 years

Who actually gets rich if Anthropic lists at $2 trillion? The S-1 filed on Monday lets us answer from the filing itself. The reported target is $1.5T to $2T, listing the week of November 16. The filing implies about 16.9B fully diluted shares. So $2T works out to roughly $118 a share. The cap table at $2T: - $199B for the 7 controlling co-founders, about 10% - $28B for Ben Mann, if his stake matches theirs - $100B for the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, 5% - $331B in employee options and RSUs, about 17% , That pool covers about 5,300 employees, an average of $62M each. - But when you joined matters enormously. The S-1 shows how much equity was granted each year, and at what price. [ Headcount went from about 300 to 500 in late 2023, to 940 at end 2024, to 5,300 now. Match the two, and here is roughly how many people made what at $2T: - $110M to $400M each: ~300 to 500 people hired by 2023 - $200M to $300M each: ~440 to 640 hired in 2024 - $70M to $95M each: ~1,360 hired in 2025 - $10M to $20M each: ~3,000 hired in 2026 So about 940 people hired by the end of 2024 average nine figures. Everyone hired since averages eight figures. The 2024 class is the surprise. That year Anthropic granted 1.28B options at $1.30 a share. At $118, that one year of grants is worth about $133B. Then there is the tender. In April, holders could sell at $25.91 a share. Investors lined up $6B, but only $4.7B sold. Weeks later, Series H priced at $58.90 a share. At $2T, the people who held would be up 4.6x. And Dario and Daniela Amodei were among the sellers. The 7 founders have pledged 80% of their equity to charity. That is about $159B at $2T. But the S-1 says the pledges are not legally binding.

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty: This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries Google’s response? Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for A few examples to illustrate: For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact -match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)” The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants) This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future This is now no longer the case At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose