2026 is a heartbreaking year for fund managers, not only because of the level of profit that the stratospheric prices of big tech companies are bringing to investors, but also because of the IPOs of new AI heavyweights like SpaceX or Anthropic.
SpaceX’s IPO has already made many of its employees millionaires, but in the case of Anthropic, the situation is intensified and the result is that eight out of ten employees of Dario Amodei and his partners will become millionaires the day after that IPO.
Four out of five. The company has already filed its documents with the SEC and plans to make its debut in mid-November, Bloomberg reports. A starting price or a specific date for its listing has not yet been set, but the valuation is said to be between $1.5 billion and $2 billion.
According to the observerA report from financial platform Hill distributes its employee loot across departments. Adding them all together, about 4,250 new millionaires emerged out of the 5,300 employees that Anthropic announced in its S-1 report to the North American stock exchange authority. This represents 80% of the labor force, a sum that does not come from any official source. SpaceX did something similar in June, turning more than 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires, but this time it had a workforce of about 22,000 employees. Anthropic has a much higher ratio of new millionaires.
That was seven already. Co-founders don’t count as new millionaires because, in fact, they are already billionaires before the company’s IPO. Forbes Assuming that the seven founders each own about 1.4% of the company.
With a valuation of between 1.5 and 2 billion in its IPO, its shares will be worth between 27,000 and 29,000 million dollars per share. Together they control about 10% of the capital. Nevertheless, they share a special share without economic rights that concentrates 50.1% of shareholder votes.
Most trusted employee. A little further down to the distribution of shares (and benefits), Hill estimates that about 50 of the first employees and managers will receive a fortune of more than $100 million after the IPO because of the value of the share packages they received as “founding employee” recognition. They make up less than 1% of the workforce and they joined Anthropy when the company had yet to prove itself.
Below that will be a second tier of about 1,200 highly qualified employees and researchers who, due to contributions linked to their salary packages, will accumulate more than $10 million, which is about a quarter of the total. Another 3,000 employees, with lower salaries, will exceed a million dollars after the IPO. These are all minimum figures, calculated based on a hypothetical valuation of 1.5 billion, to which we need to add about 1,000 employees who will fall below that million dollars.
Commitments and deadlines. The seven co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth to philanthropic causes aimed at eliminating the negative impacts of the technology they are developing. Dario Amodei writes that the concern is “a level of wealth concentration that will destroy society.” Anthropic’s own IPO prospectus acknowledges that AI “has the potential to centralize power and wealth.”
However, the money won’t flow to Anthropic’s employees all at once, as employees won’t be able to sell their shares immediately after the IPO, but instead will be phased out starting in January 2027. Anthropic will use a portion of what it raises to tax its employee shares
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Picture | Flickr (TechCrunch)
