With the midterms in the rearview mirror, the next megaevent for the markets is Anthropic's pending initial public offering. Even with the bloom off the rose of the artificial-intelligence trade, the offering will probably rival SpaceX's as the biggest ever.
A bit of arithmetic making the rounds on Wall Street, derived in part from Anthropic's prospectus, makes those points clear. Which calculation is that, you ask? After all, the AI giant is arguably nothing if not a confabulation of mind-blowing numerals and integers.
Simply this: According to a blog published by MindStudio, a platform for building AI Agents, Anthropic's IPO will make as many as 1,000 of its employees worth $100 million or more.
And Happy Thanksgiving to you, too!
When first presented with these numbers, I was skeptical. "Not possible," I snorted (channeling the old bankers in Mary Poppins). But if you look at the math, it isn't so far-fetched. For starters, 1,000 employees times $100 million equals $100 billion. Yes, $100 billion is a massive amount of money, but only 5% of Anthropic's hoped-for market capitalization of $2 trillion. Bottom line: A slew of young people could soon be in clover from Anthropic's coming IPO, and other deals too. What's a parent to do?
Second, Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of MindStudio, estimates that at a $2 trillion valuation, the total employee pool would be roughly $331 billion. With an estimated 5,300 employees, that works out to an average of about $62 million per person, "though the real distribution is far from even," MindStudio notes. This doesn't even include Anthropic's seven founders, whose stakes are now each about $14 billion (80% of which they say they will give away).
True, all of this assumes that $2 trillion valuation. If Anthropic's IPO is a turkey, or even priced 25% lower at $1.5 trillion (which is certainly possible), there will be fewer top AI researchers with less massive payouts. (Say, some 750 people with $75 million.) Directionally, though, the center still holds here -- Anthropic should make a high school football stadium-full of employees generationally wealthy. And while the company recently noted it was hiring a smaller share of junior technical positions, many of the soon-to-be-gilded are in their 20s or 30s.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Of course, Anthropic isn't the only mega-wealth-creation machine these days. There was SpaceX prior and presumably OpenAI after, along with a good number of other AI-related start-ups making very young people very rich.
And it got me thinking, what do parents of these newly minted young people make of this?
"That's our retirement plan," one parent told me with a laugh. They were joking. I think.
Kidding aside, this is sensitive stuff. Senior family members I talked to declined to be identified or provide too much detail about these windfalls for fear of offending their kids or creating security risks. Still, they were fascinating conversations.
The parents of these highly successful young tech kids expressed almost awe about their offspring. "I'm immensely proud," said the father of a 20-something-year-old founder, worth billions after the sale of his company. "I always thought he was the smartest person I'd ever met."
They told me super-impressive stories about their children, some who went on to excel at highly selective colleges. One of the kids "was always a workaholic. He asked for extra work from the age of 6," which brings home the point that there aren't any Ringo Starrs here. The young brainiacs at OpenAI, Hugging Face, or Databricks aren't there by luck. Still, there might be some chance involved. One of the kids has a sibling who was in a start-up that didn't work out.
Have the parents spoken to their children about this newfound wealth? Yes and no. "I've talked about it generally, but he's smart enough to know," said one parent. "It's staggering. They have to figure out how they're going to give it away. My only advice is you can't take it with you."
The parents also thought that their children would be levelheaded and are already planning to be very philanthropic with their newfound wealth. Some stressed that this should not be a family decision, as the children are independent-minded adults.
What about asking for the kid to build a family compound in Florida or Fiji? "No, no, no," a parent says. "It's their money."
As it turns out, the mad money these young people are making in tech is in the same ballpark as the fortunes being earned by young sports stars. Take Kevin McGonigle, a 22-year-old infielder with the Detroit Tigers who this past spring signed an eight-year, $150 million deal. (Eight years may be somewhat commensurate to the time required to achieve that kind of payout in tech, between being hired early enough to get a stock package that works out like that, plus the time it takes to vest.)
As for McGonigle, who made the All-Star team this year and is a heavy favorite to win the 2026 American League Rookie of the Year award on Monday, he sounds like he's aiming to earn his keep. "I'm going to go out and give it all I've got," McGonigle says.
May the young titans of tech keep their eye on the ball too.
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