00:08:05 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:08:05] S3: And what jumps out on the governance front is that the seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, have got a majority shareholding vote of 50.1%, which essentially means that if all of us buy a share in the company, we don't have any control over how it's run. And the reason they give for that is they say, Well, we need to be able to control things for the public good, because it has this very unusual public benefit corporation structure with a trust over the top of that, aiming to shepherd how it's wrong. But that is a rather unusual way of doing things. [00:08:49] S2: Trust us. Yeah. And what's really interesting about that is also that single share retains that 50.1% voting power as long as there are at least three of the founders still at the company. So only when five of them have left does that thing kind of expire. So it's quite kind of ironclad And again, just gives them the power to be like, you know, usually when you buy into a company, you're buying a vote. You know, like, if you don't like how this company is run, you can vote to remove the CEO. [00:09:23] S3: And they set out the consequences of that, don't they? Quite clearly. They say, As a result, our governance structure may make it more difficult to replace our directors and management, including those seven co founders, and may have the effect of depriving our stockholders of an opportunity to sell their shares at a premium over prevailing market prices.
00:09:23 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:09:23] S3: And they set out the consequences of that, don't they? Quite clearly. They say, As a result, our governance structure may make it more difficult to replace our directors and management, including those seven co founders, and may have the effect of depriving our stockholders of an opportunity to sell their shares at a premium over prevailing market prices. [00:09:43] S2: Yeah. And it should be said, like, this is a tech thing. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is effectively the emperor of Meta. He can't be removed. He has majority control. Like, this is what a lot of tech founders do. [00:09:54] S3: And they make a big point, don't they, in the document of still having the seven cofounders in place? Yeah. And they don't explicitly say it, but clearly their massive rival, OpenAI, where they all used to work, doesn't have that at all. [00:10:09] S2: Yeah. It's like more of a viper's nest. Everybody's left. [00:10:11] S3: It's that famous photo of all the co founders with their faces, the ones who've left faces blanked out. [00:10:17] S2: That's right. [00:10:17] S3: But they do say as well that, you know, the reason they're doing this is because sometimes they will have to I have to read some of the jargon depart from profit maximization in order to appropriately balance the public good. So they may have to make decisions about the company that might not be financially the best decision, but might be the best for safety. Right. For humanity, for the country of geniuses in a data center that they create.
00:10:17 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:10:17] S3: But they do say as well that, you know, the reason they're doing this is because sometimes they will have to I have to read some of the jargon depart from profit maximization in order to appropriately balance the public good. So they may have to make decisions about the company that might not be financially the best decision, but might be the best for safety. Right. For humanity, for the country of geniuses in a data center that they create. [00:10:44] S2: There is this other layer that we should talk about, which is this long term benefit trust, which is... Has up to seven trustees, and they have the power to remove board members. So there is this level of oversight, but they can't kind of affect strategy. They can move people from the board. It's unclear whether they... That would actually include... Like, if they removed, for some reason, Dario Amodei from the board, would he still be the CEO? Right? I think he would be. But those long term benefit trusts, which has power to hire and fire the the board, is really interesting. And it's led by this guy, Neil Shah, who is the former CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative of Global Health and Development. Inside, we'll just go through briefly who these people are because I think it kind of paints a picture as to how Anthropic thinks about their technologies. The other people are Richard Fontaine. He is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security and National Security Specialist. Ben Bernanke, former head of the Federal Reserve. [00:11:48] S3: Probably the only name I know, actually.
00:11:48 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:11:48] S3: Probably the only name I know, actually. [00:11:50] S2: And Christopher Stubbs, former dean of science at Harvard and a physicist and also in the national security. So we're talking about national security, global development, economics, and these are the people, the kind of the adults who are kind of overseeing the the board, which I think is really interesting when you think about, you know, the framing of this technology and what they think it's gonna do. But, anyway, the bottom line is they're saying we we wanna raise something we think they haven't said around a $100,000,000,000 into this two... Potentially $2,000,000,000,000 company, but you get no vote. Effectively, it's like trust us. And we've seen how that movie goes before at other tech companies. [00:12:25] S3: And they say quite clearly, when you buy a share, this isn't a transaction. You are buying in. Let me find the quote. [00:12:34] S2: Oh, it's a quote unquote chance to be part of something greater. [00:12:39] S3: There you go. [00:12:39] S2: End quote. [00:12:40] S3: It's not it's not... You're not just buying share. This is the vision. [00:12:43] S2: Which leads on to the finances, which is the next thing we should get into. [00:12:48] S3: How much money it's making, how much money it's spending. Mean, on the revenue point, it is making a lot. Oh my goodness. And the growth makes it really hard, I think, for investors to work out how much it might make in future. Its revenue has gone up 1300% in the last year. So it was $1,200,000,000 last year, dollars 16,200,000,000 this year.
00:12:48 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:12:48] S3: How much money it's making, how much money it's spending. Mean, on the revenue point, it is making a lot. Oh my goodness. And the growth makes it really hard, I think, for investors to work out how much it might make in future. Its revenue has gone up 1300% in the last year. So it was $1,200,000,000 last year, dollars 16,200,000,000 this year. [00:13:14] S2: Yeah, for the first six months of this year. Yeah. [00:13:17] S3: And they say in the document as well, they're not going to, when it comes to growing their revenue, they're not going to branch out into advertising either. They talk about the number of companies using their services. They've got more than 1,900 customers spending a million dollars or more, and about two fifty customers spending $10,000,000 or more. [00:13:37] S2: And I think the other thing that's going be really fascinating is just like their spending is about to explode. Mhmm. Because, you know, in the risk factors, right at the top, like, first several are all about access to compute, access to energy, access to infrastructure. In other words, do we have enough data centers to run this thing to help... To keep growing at the rate we're growing? And they're doing this through lease deals and also they're gonna start actually effectively building their own data centers. [00:14:06] S3: Mhmm.
00:14:06 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:14:06] S3: Mhmm. [00:14:06] S2: And when you add it all up, you get close to $800,000,000,000 in commitments. Several $100,000,000 billion dollars of that is like you are paying that regardless of whether you use it or whatever. So it's like it's a big chunk. And I think it's really interesting. The thing... Two things we don't know is, you know, people have been talking about how expensive their AI is, and then you've had the rise of these cheap effectively free open source models that are really, really good and that have taken a ton of market share. And we haven't... What they haven't included yet is the last three months through September. Like, has growth slowed? You know, what does that look like? Is it continuing? Or are they starting to see, like, companies being like, actually, I'm gonna do a bunch of open source stuff. It's way cheaper. So seeing what that... If that growth is continuing and also getting a bit more granular on, like, how much money do you have to spend on data centers based on the contracts you've already signed. [00:15:03] S3: And their cost of revenue has gone down. Right? So they talk about spending $2.50 on computing power and infrastructure for every dollar of revenue in the first quarter of last year. And then when you look at the second quarter of this year, that had gone down to $0.50 So it is going down. But as you say, the spending is astonishing. And it's really with the people that you'd expect, with NVIDIA, Broadcom, AMD, Amazon, huge investor in Anthropic, SpaceX AI. And even Britain's very own EnScale is on the list.