⚡ The IPO hasn’t been priced yet, but the dilution math is already on the table
Anthropic is set to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, sometime in the next few weeks. CNBC said on November 7 that the target is mid-November.
The pricing outlook has already softened. Last month, the market was talking about $2 trillion. On November 6, CNBC quoted several investors saying that even $1.5 trillion was now in doubt. One called that figure “a hard sell”; $1 trillion to $1.25 trillion sounded more realistic. The company’s May private funding round valued it at $965 billion.
The crypto world is doing a different kind of math. On November 5, BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes published “D is for Dilution,” laying out the vesting schedules for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
SpaceX listed on Nasdaq in June under the ticker SPCX, priced its shares at $135, raised about $75 billion, and was valued at $1.77 trillion. By June 2027, about 8.6 billion shares are set to unlock—equivalent to adding half the current share count. For Anthropic, Hayes estimates from the amended prospectus that early public investors could face dilution of up to 83% by June 2027. At a $1.5 trillion valuation, for the share price to stay where it is, someone would have to come up with another roughly $1.245 trillion to absorb those shares. Who’s going to pay?
That figure is not the company’s funding requirement. crypto.news made a point of noting that unlocking old shares is not the same as issuing new shares. The 83% figure is Hayes’s estimate based on his reading of the filing.
The real question is where that money would come from. Hayes’s chain of reasoning is short: share prices fall, borrowing gets more expensive for AI companies, banks pull back both lending and stock financing, bank balance sheets stop expanding, and there are fewer dollars. Fewer dollars means less fuel for Bitcoin. That’s the whole chain. He acknowledged that bank balance sheets had declined week over week last week, and also that one month of data isn’t enough to establish a trend.
D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria put it more bluntly to CNBC: the market needs this IPO to succeed, the underwriters understand that, and the best thing to do is price it where it can sell.
What is Hayes doing himself? Maelstrom has been sitting on the sidelines since November 5, after previously closing about $22.28 million in directional positions. Waiting for a signal. On October 15, he was still bullish.
There was another backdrop that same week. In the midterm elections, most of the ballot measures to slow data center construction passed. AI lost its first round at the ballot box.
Raoul Pal disagrees with this line of reasoning, saying that debt at hyperscalers amounts to only about 3.5% of their market value. The three labs Hayes is watching aren’t the same companies as these cloud providers in the first place. That’s where the disagreement lies.
Crypto prices barely moved today. BTC ranged from $75,874 to $75,981, with six price sources tracking closely. ETH was at $2,238 to $2,241. AI-related tokens TAO at 224.8, FET at 0.1437, and RENDER at 1.57 were all within 1% of their previous prices.
The market is quiet because the price hasn’t been set yet. Once that opening price comes out in mid-November, AI stocks and AI tokens will both know where they stand.
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