Burry’s latest post fits a view that he has held through 2026: frontier AI valuations price scarcity and hype, not durable economics.
- Burry said on Tuesday that Anthropic’s valuation can swallow 78 S&P 500 firms, including but not limited to Domino’s, Clorox, J.M. Smucker, Stanley Black & Decker, Deckers, and Lululemon.
- In a June Substack chat, after Anthropic raised at about $965 billion, he wrote there was “no guarantee, and not even a strong likelihood,” that the company is long-term worth anywhere near $1 trillion.
- In late September, he wrote that, “for the benefit of humanity, the markets should tank hard and prevent the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.”
Michael Burry said on Tuesday that Anthropic’s roughly $965 billion private valuation is large enough to buy 78 profitable S&P 500 companies, a comparison he uses to argue that AI’s private-market prices have outrun the earnings and sales of established businesses.
The Valuation Gap
Posting on X as Cassandra Unchained, Burry described a “fun game in times like these”: take a private company’s valuation and count how many profitable S&P 500 firms it would buy. He put the number for Anthropic at 78, listing Domino’s, Clorox, J.M. Smucker, Stanley Black & Decker, Deckers, Lululemon, McCormick, Tractor Supply, NVR, Albemarle, News Corp, Alliant Energy, Kimco Realty, Hormel, Weyerhaeuser, DaVita, Zimmer Biomet, Lennox, Masco, A.O. Smith, MGM, Wynn, Brown-Forman, Norwegian Cruise Line, and Huntington Ingalls, among others.
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in its May funding round. Burry contrasted that with the largest inflation-adjusted pre-IPO valuation of the 1990–2000 period: United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) at $119 billion, when the company was already 92 years old. That price, he wrote, was 26 times earnings, on a net margin of about 8.6% and 2.4 times sales.
Burry’s Long Bearish View
The post fits a view Burry has held through 2026: frontier AI valuations price scarcity and hype, not durable economics. In a June Substack chat, after Anthropic raised at about $965 billion, he wrote there was “no guarantee, and not even a strong likelihood,” that the company is long-term worth anywhere near $1 trillion. He called cutting-edge model work “far too expensive, too much brute force,” and said computing power “will be commoditized, like internet use,” with current demand a “false demand signal.” He added that he would count to one trillion before paying that sum, and “in 240,000 years I might reconsider.”
Further, on September 14, he called OpenAI and Anthropic talk of slowing development “self-serving,” arguing large language models “are not AI and won’t be AGI,” that a pause would help incumbents as rivals catch up, and that “we are so awesome it could become dangerous” is IPO “hype & puffery” covering slower growth. On September 29, he wrote that, “for the benefit of humanity, the markets should tank hard and prevent the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs,” and that the firms would “suck up and then destroy TRILLIONS of dollars of capital.”
Anthropic, OpenAI IPO Plans
Anthropic and OpenAI are heading toward the public markets, but on different clocks and with very different disclosed numbers. Anthropic has filed a confidential prospectus that, according to Reuters, points to a listing valued at about $2 trillion — more than double the roughly $965 billion mark from its May fundraising — with the offering expected after the November midterms, after earlier plans for an October debut slipped. The filing shows revenue rising twelvefold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while the operating loss widened to $8.06 billion from $2.98 billion.
OpenAI filed confidentially in June, but CEO Sam Altman has since ruled out going public this year, citing AI safety.
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around Anthropic was bearish at the time of writing.
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