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birb_cromble  1mo ago (text post)   1266 thread views

Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-09-12

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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Are you going to invest in Anthropic's purported $2T IPO?

No, because my read is that either we have a Butlerian Jihad (and Anthropic loses most of its value, though not all) or we all get paperclipped.

In the extremely-unlikely case that Anthropic actually manages to pull off alignment of neural-net ASI, they could also turn around and stiff their shareholders.

Very tempting to rent them. I'll probably ask for an allocation. Might sell first day.

I've wanted to buy and sell the first couple days a couple times, but it seems that there's a threat you'll be banned from future IPOs. Is that something that actually happens?

I will wait for the S-1 to make any decisions, but my gut prediction is that I won't be touching it with a ten foot pole. All of the leaked data suggests shaky financials with fickle customers and costs that aren't entirely under their control. That sounds less like a high margin software company and more like an airline.

Fair! Just curious, how did you feel about SpaceX? their unprecedented shareholder restrictions? obviously not the same, but id like to hear your take.

I was mildly optimistic about SpaceX until the S-1 came out. The launch business has legs due to government contracts, but the xAI portion of the business is a giant pit in the ground where they set money on fire. At this point their financials suggests they're a data center REIT with delusions of grandeur. I'm not willing to make a long term bet on that. If the stock price drops to around $70 I'll reconsider, and I'd also do so if the AI portion of their company shows improvements. Until then I'm sitting on the sidelines.

Chiming in, because I am enraged by SpaceX:

It has a very fascinating and appealing component, but with a bunch of unappealing things bolted onto it. All the baggage dilutes and, worse, confuses its exceptional part, which turns it into an Elon fanboi bet.

The shareholder restrictions don't matter and are even good: if you do want to buy Elon, you want undiluted Elon, not a conventional company.

I'll wait for the S-1 to decide for sure, but most likely yes, up to 5% of my portfolio.

Why not more? I have a high degree of conviction that AI will radically accelerate the economy (mod any paperclip effects), but I'm much less sure on who will reap most of the benefits. I could see anything from Ant/OAI/GOOG individually taking it all, to an oligopoly, to it diffusing through the economy with relatively few rents accruing to the labs as intelligence is commoditized. And there is a built in cap to returns: even (or especially) if everything goes perfectly according to plan for Ant, they will become the number one target for redistribution, and short of Dario overthrowing the government, he'll be asked to share with everyone else. Someone's X% ownership of Ant is not going to be getting them X% of the light cone.

If OpenAI went public the same day, would you split that 5% clean in half?

Depends on the S-1s, but I intuitively feel OAI at 1.2T (the most recent rumored private valuation) vs Ant at 2T probably has more upside. Ant having better enterprise numbers for a couple quarters because of coding agents doesn't say that much about the ultimate winner in the case where commoditization doesn't happen and one ends up dominating.

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