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Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

businessinsider.com

11–20 of 166 posts

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#11
The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore. So, in some sense, it is immaterial that the rosy scenarios where AI is responsible for >$30 trillion in the next decade are unlikely. If you bet against the hype and it goes on for a few more months/years you lose as much or more than if you went along for the ride.

Burry is well aware of this, he has written about how passive investing is contributing to this problem.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say AI is doomed or a fluke, he said that these two AI companies aren't worth 1T in capitalization. The same way semiconductor, internet or railroad companies were not great investments regardless of how important the technology was going to be. It's still a financial investment and it's only going to pay off if bought at the right price, not at crazy multiples. I will also add: if all your moat is your lat…

Anthropic is the one company where that makes no sense. If revenue really is about 50 billion annually and growing than that means that a 20x 1 year of revenue valuation is modest compared to the shenanigans that have been going in the market. It's almost classically textbook conservative in comparison. The moat with these corporate enterprise contracts is literally your conversation history and companies aren't like…

All competitors need are their latest model to be either better or similar but much cheaper. And Anthropic has no less than 2 big competitors in the space in US alone providing similar quality models.

There's no moat in LLMs when you're as good as your latest model.

Companies out there aren't in the business of throwing money down the drain.

Take DS4, you can use Deepseek APIs directly with Claude Code, and you're unlikely to notice a difference for the overwhelming majority of your use cases. But your bills run in few $ per day. I'm talking 2 magnitudes less.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#13
post #6

It’s very risky to make these kind of claims. If the denominator (USD) gets obliterated they might very well be worth $1T. It’s all about liquidity and central banks have a whole bag of tricks at their disposal. They never want to see deflation shocks again and they prefer asset inflation.

That seems like a hollow win.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say AI is doomed or a fluke, he said that these two AI companies aren't worth 1T in capitalization. The same way semiconductor, internet or railroad companies were not great investments regardless of how important the technology was going to be. It's still a financial investment and it's only going to pay off if bought at the right price, not at crazy multiples. I will also add: if all your moat is your lat…

Anthropic is the one company where that makes no sense. If revenue really is about 50 billion annually and growing than that means that a 20x 1 year of revenue valuation is modest compared to the shenanigans that have been going in the market. It's almost classically textbook conservative in comparison. The moat with these corporate enterprise contracts is literally your conversation history and companies aren't like…

We know nothing about Anthropic, they make a few money go round deals, announce a bit of revenue, extrapolate it into the whole year and people parrot that they may be making $50bn. Most likely the cost to remain competitive eats at whatever revenue they could hope to make. I expect them to fudge the numbers the last quarter before their IPO, dump on passive investors, and then go back to being officially unprofitable.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#16
I think you could argue Anthropic could be worth $1T. With AI becoming an essential work utility, every global knowledge worker would want a claude subscription. There are 650M to 1B of such office workers. 300M workers × $50/month × 12 = $180B/year. The genie is not going back into the bottle, I have seen what claude code can do when properly connected to tools.

But Micheals arguments are valid. There could be competition, or even local models, thus indeed becoming 'commoditized'.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#17

bro was right ONCE and now every tweet is a headline

He's still right this time. Neither Anthropic, Open AI nor SpaceX in its current form is a good candidate for an IPO at valuations that all but guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars in "passive capital" aka pension funds and ETFs will have to buy in. SpaceX might have been a candidate on its own core business (aka: launching spacecraft and Starlink), but ever since the weird side deals with all of the other compa…

Elon must be looking to merge the new amalgamation of SPCX into TSLA and join all his sinking ships in one. Starlink itself won't be able to save that, but make it too big and the government might. That is the way to get to the ridiculous valuations needed for Elon's pay package.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#18

bro was right ONCE and now every tweet is a headline

He's been wrong a few times, but has been right far more than ONCE and appears to be profitably making decisions. For example:

Short dot.com stocks (55% return), short subprime mortgages (Massive return), long Gamestop 2019, short ARKK 2021, The shorts on Palantir and NVDA are probably still running (PLTR 25% in profit, NVDA 20% loss).

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#19

bro was right ONCE and now every tweet is a headline

He's still right this time. Neither Anthropic, Open AI nor SpaceX in its current form is a good candidate for an IPO at valuations that all but guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars in "passive capital" aka pension funds and ETFs will have to buy in. SpaceX might have been a candidate on its own core business (aka: launching spacecraft and Starlink), but ever since the weird side deals with all of the other compa…

True, but the VC money will have been paid back, and what are we if not meat for the soulless machine of capitalism?

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#20
The real question is how we are defining "worth." Much of the market has decoupled from traditional fundamental data, with Tesla's P/E of 380 illustrating this perfectly, but the Tesla stock price refuses to collapse.

We all know the market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent if you bet against it. If you watched "The Long Short" (excellent movie btw.) you know how close Michael Burry came to capitulation before his subprime bet paid off. He seems to have a tendency to be too early with his predictions, even with his genius GameStop investment. So while he may be right again fundamentally, his timing may be completely off and those companies could be "worth" significantly more than a trillion dollars, at least temporarily, in stock valuations.

My personal prediction is this: The hype will go on longer than people think, just like with the New Economy. There is this quote from market analyst Larry Wachtel in 1999 who said: "Everybody's happy, everybody's making money - something's wrong here"[1]. Ironically, even Wachtel eventually succumbed to FOMO, capitulated, went in late, and lost a lot of money[2]. I am trying to not make his mistake, but it will be tempting to do so, I am sure about that.

[1] https://youtu.be/uaK5tsH59UM?t=1188

[2] https://youtu.be/DSVPsP0Bfx0?t=456

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