Salesforce put about $50 million into Anthropic in 2023.
By its last quarter, that stake was worth roughly $5.1 billion. Salesforce booked a $2.6 billion paper gain on it, and the stock jumped 23% in a single session.
Now think about how many companies are sitting on something like that.
The list of public companies tied into Anthropic, through ownership stakes and long-term deals, is longer than the list of men who signed the Declaration of Independence.
When Anthropic prices in November, every one of them gets marked to a real number in one shot.
Some of them are going to get a Salesforce day, and some aren’t.
Below, I’ll show you which companies have the most riding on this IPO, exactly how much, and the one thing that could flip the whole list before November.
Amazon’s net income jumped 244% last quarter to $62.6 billion, and the biggest driver was a $53.4 billion gain the company attributed mainly to its Anthropic investment.
On top of that, Anthropic has committed to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon’s cloud over the next decade.
Google holds roughly 14% of Anthropic, according to court documents, and is contractually capped at 15%. It’s also renting Anthropic up to 1 million of its AI chips.
Microsoft and Nvidia joined last November with commitments of up to $5 billion and up to $10 billion. And ServiceNow made Claude the default model behind its Build Agent back in January, which puts Claude in front of tens of thousands of ServiceNow’s enterprise customers.
Hans Albrecht, our head of income trading, has been digging through all of it.
He counts somewhere between 50 and 100 public companies that are direct or indirect partners.
It’s the biggest hive of different companies meeting at one IPO I’ve ever seen, even more than SpaceX.
I think the audit is why it slipped to November.
Before a single share sells, Anthropic has to produce clean, audited numbers for all of it, including which stakes can be diluted and which can’t, and which lease and compute commitments count as near-term or long-term liabilities.
It’s probably the most complex pre-IPO audit out there, and it isn’t being run by somebody like Elon Musk, who’s been taking companies public since the late ’90s.
Hans put it more bluntly. “In Elon, people trust,” he said. “In the guys that keep telling you everyone’s going to lose your job and you have a 10% chance of dying from this stuff, I don’t know if people are feeling too good about these guys.”
A clean audit and a November pricing, and I think the market is fine with a couple of extra weeks.
A rumor that the auditors found something they don’t like, or a delay beyond November, and I think people start hitting the panic button across the whole web.
I’m live tomorrow at 6pm with Hannah, and we’re walking through exactly that: where the opportunity is in the companies tied to this IPO, which names we’re looking at and why, and the pitfalls. It’s free, but you have to register.
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Your only option,
Mark Sebastian
P.S. When Anthropic files its public S-1, it will put an exact number on every one of these stakes for the first time, including Amazon’s, which the company doesn’t even disclose as a percentage today. That document is going to move a lot of stocks the day it drops.