Hi Traders.
Back in February, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation.
I saw the headline and wanted in.
That happened right around the time I switched from OpenAI's model (ChatGPT) to Anthropic's (Claude). Claude beat ChatGPT in every way, and it wasn't close.
While OpenAI had people making AI cat videos (hilarious, but useless), Anthropic poured its resources into coding. It looked like high school kids goofing off with a new toy while the professionals down the hall solved real business problems.
At the same time, OpenAI carried a valuation north of $850 billion and climbing. Anthropic had the better product at less than half the price. That's easy to see.
So, I went looking for a way to buy Anthropic.
The Two Doors
You had two ways in.
The first ran through the secondary marketplaces: Forge Global, Hiive, EquityZen. You verify you're accredited, you get approved, and you bid on shares that employees or early investors want to sell. Minimums usually start around $25,000 and climb from there.
I've spent 25 years trading on exchanges.
I know who sits on the other side of my order, I know what happens when I lift an offer, and if something goes wrong I know there's a clearing house, a rule book and a phone number.
I trust the system.
The secondary market, though, doesn't work that way. In a lot of cases you didn't buy shares at all. You bought into a special purpose vehicle (SPV), a partnership that holds the shares, and sometimes an SPV that owns a piece of another SPV, with layers stacked between you and the actual certificate.
I kept reading about people who wired money, waited, and never quite knew what they owned.
Call me naive. The valuation excited me, and it felt like a no-brainer. The way to get in didn't.
The second door ran through pre-IPO funds: Destiny Tech100 (DXYZ), ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) and, since March, Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI). You buy them from any brokerage account with no accreditation required.
… Except they trade at a premium to net asset value, sometimes a big one.
So, I'd pay up for a fund that owns a sliver of the thing I want, then pay up again for the privilege of the wrapper. That's two markups to own maybe eight percent Anthropic exposure.
I walked past both doors.
Then May 11th Happened
Anthropic announced that it doesn’t permit SPVs to acquire its stock, and that any transfer of shares to one is void under its transfer restrictions.
It named eight platforms directly. Forge and Hiive made the list.
One tokenized Anthropic product built on top of those SPVs fell from roughly $1,400 to $900 in a single day. Almost 40% vanished because the company never authorized the shares the token claimed to represent.
Here's the important part: That announcement left real equity untouched. Employees and investors still own exactly what they owned on May 10th.
The announcement zeroed out something else: the middleman's claim that he could sell you a slice of somebody else's shares without the company signing off.
The people who got hurt bought in through those wrappers.
I had no idea that was coming.
I had no special insight into transfer restrictions.
I DID have a bad feeling about a market I didn't understand, and I stayed out of it.
That saved me.
Where That Leaves Us…
Anthropic now looks set to price around $2 trillion at the IPO, and soon. Had I bought it at $380 billion in February, that's a five bagger in under a year.
At those levels, I don't want the IPO.
Anthropic makes a great product, and I'll keep saying so while I keep using it every day. But a great company at $2 trillion doesn't make a great price.
The trade I want now sits in the companies wired into Anthropic. An enormous web of them hangs off this listing, and money will move through all of them in both directions for 90 days. Those names trade on exchanges with real bids, real asks and defined risk.
That's my arena, and it's Mark Sebastian's too.
Mark traded around events like this for a long time, and he ran the same playbook through the SpaceX listing.
So I'll follow along with him and our team as Anthropic comes to market.
Enjoy the Journey,
Tim