Anthropic seeking $1.3T valuation

Our time now is 22 minutes after six. The AI company Anthropic is seeking a $1.3 trillion valuation as it gets ready to go public. Joining me now is financial advisor Chris Markowski. Chris, thanks for joining us this morning. Good morning. Morning. All right. So what does the number Chris actually mean? How can an AI company be worth that much money without providing steady profits? Well, you know, the funny thing about markets and what things are worth, something is worth what somebody else is willing to pay for. It's just that simple. Let me give you an example. I have a baseball card collection from when I was a kid, and I got about eight or nine rookie. Ricky Henderson cards right near you. Basically, the Oakland A's over there. You know, the book says they're worth X amount of dollars, but it's only worth what somebody is actually willing to pay for. And Thrawn... Anthropic, again, they're making money. This is very, very different. Then the whole dot-com run-up where you had a lot of companies out there that just had a dot-com attached to it. You had a 20-year-old CEO with a goatee and a foosball table in the break room. They actually make money. They're generating revenues. It's what their projections are for the future, and that's why it has this valuation. It was actually originally almost a $2 trillion valuation. It's come down a little bit, and some are actually saying it might even, because of the numbers that just came out, might be higher next week. Oh, interesting. Okay. Okay, all right, so when a high-profile tech stock... Goes public. Early buzz can trigger wild swings on the first day of trading, as you know. For retail investors tempted to buy shares immediately, though, what are the biggest financial risks for doing something like this? Um, there's probably a 99.9% chance that most people out there are not going to get IPO stock, whether it's priced at whether it be $70 or $78, do not chase on the opening day. Just, just don't do it. Um, the things pop and then they're going to come back down. We, I think we talked about this here on the program in regards to SpaceX. I'm on a blacklist for IPOs because whenever they gave them to me, I would just sell on the first day. And then wait to buy when they got cheaper again. And Wall Street doesn't like that very much. Don't be a sucker. You know, 26 million shares that is actually in price is basically the insiders selling out of their position. Again, the lockup is much shorter with Anthropic than other ones. So I'd be very, very careful. All right. So if I don't plan on buying shares of Anthropic on day one, does this debut still affect things like my 401k, my IRA, index funds, things like that? Well, it depends on what you own. Maybe some of the funds that you own, you have a piece of it. Maybe some of them actually that you own might have it already priced in if it's like a private equity type of a situation that they have it at a much lower price. The IPO market has changed greatly after the dot-com collapse, and in my opinion, not in a good way. Back then, people could actually get involved with these deals at a much lower valuation. What's happened since then is basically you've got venture capital and private equity that ladder the valuations of these companies up over an extended period of time. And then when it comes to the public marketplace as an IPO, the average investor is getting in at a much, much higher valuation. Yeah, that is what we saw with SpaceX as, you know, as a lay person, as myself watching it all play out, you know, when these big companies Meta, I think was one of the first ones where you couldn't get in right away. You had to wait till, you know. You know, the big-name people got in first. All right, Chris Murkowski, thank you so much for joining us this morning and providing your expert insight of a company in our own backyard getting ready to go public here. We'll see what happens with the valuation next week again. Appreciate your time. You got it. Have a great day. You too.