Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and Democrat mega-donor, holds a one percent stake in Anthropic that traces back to an early investment of millions in the AI startup. This stake could add up to $10 billion to Schmidt’s net worth when the company notable for its AI doomer messages goes public.
Bloomberg reports that Schmidt first invested in Anthropic in 2021, when the company was valued at $461 million, according to Pitchbook data. It’s unclear whether he has sold any portion of his stake since then. Schmidt and Anthropic both declined to comment.
That early bet looks increasingly lucrative. Investors last week signaled a fair valuation for Anthropic of between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion. The high end of that range would value the company at more than 4,300 times its Series A valuation. Using the $2 trillion figure, Schmidt’s stake would boost his net worth by about one-third, to nearly $80 billion, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index. Measured against Anthropic’s most recent valuation of $965 billion, the stake would still add nearly $10 billion to his current fortune of $57.5 billion.
Anthropic’s seven co-founders are each worth $8 billion based on the company’s last funding round, enough to land them on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s 500 richest people. The IPO, which is expected in November but does not have a date set yet, is sure to mint many new leftist billionaires and millionaires associated with the Effective Altruism movement.
Schmidt has made his investments through several vehicles, including TomorrowVentures, Innovation Endeavors and his family office, Hillspire, which Pitchbook links to hundreds of venture capital deals. His early portfolio leaned toward consumer internet, software and fintech companies. Lately he’s focused on artificial intelligence, backing Mistral AI, Reflection AI, World Labs and Anthropic.
The Anthropic stake isn’t his first outsize win. Innovation Endeavors made an early bet on Uber Technologies in 2011, and that investment’s value rose roughly 1,400-fold, reaching $82 billion by the time of Uber’s 2019 IPO. If Anthropic goes public at a $2 trillion valuation, Schmidt’s return on the AI company would beat what he made on Uber.
Anthropic is expected to begin formally marketing its IPO as soon as the week of November 9, with trading likely to start before the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. People familiar with the matter say the company’s debut is expected no later than the end of the year. Anthropic is aiming to match or exceed the size of SpaceX’s record $1.77 trillion IPO in June, according to people familiar with the matter.
Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei have been at the forefront of the AI doomer movement, with Amodei calling for an AI slowdown, which OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both supported:
Amodei’s essay lays out a three-step plan meant to temper the AI industry’s development pace without stopping it outright. “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” he wrote.
Anthropic claims it has already taken the first step itself. The company has “unilaterally” committed to giving third-party evaluators employee-level access so they can verify its safety practices and report incidents, a move Amodei said comes without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.” The second step calls on leading AI companies in democratic countries to coordinate around common safety standards. The third, and most ambitious, asks for coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
