Bits + Bips: How the Dimon vs. Armstrong Clash Reveals Crypto at Peak Political Power

**Chris Perkins** (0:00)
The difference between him and many of the traditional CEOs that you'll see is that he's founder led, right? He founded that company, and founder led companies are wired differently. And if you're a founder, and you've been a disruptor your entire career, you're also a lot more paranoid than other people because you know what a disruptor can do.
Jeff is sitting on top of a $90 billion company. Oh, and by the way, he bought NYSE. Who would have thought this startup coming out of nowhere and derivatives buys NYSE, one of the most storied. It's the tale is old as time, derivatives are more important than spot. Sorry guys, that's the reason why I spot NYSE. Now, so he's $90 billion market cut founder and he's like, there's 11 guys over there, they're killing it.

**Austin Campbell** (0:42)
Hey everyone, welcome to Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. We're here today to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro, but before we begin, a quick commercial break.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:58)
If you've been loving Bits and Bips, don't forget that the show is transitioning to its own feeds on X, YouTube, and your favorite podcast player. If you're not already subscribed to Bits and Bips on its own channels, go there now and hit that subscribe button so you can keep up with our twice weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns. Bits and Bips will only be on the Unchained feed for a few more weeks, so subscribe today to be ready for launch. You can get all the links at unchainedcrypto.com/bits and Bips.

**Austin Campbell** (1:27)
All right. Welcome back. And as always, I'm your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. Here with my co-hosts, Ram Alawalia, Maester of Wealth, the leader of Lumida, and Chris Perkins, the golden hand of CoinFund. Before we begin today, a quick note for everybody. We're going to be transitioning to new dedicated Bits and Bips channels. We've begun releasing shorter segments from the episodes there, but next week, we're officially moving the full Bits and Bips interviews to their new home on the dedicated channels. So if you're not subscribed on X, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, please go there and sign up for now so you can keep up with us. Now, let's talk about something that's relatively big news here, which is Anthropic has filed for an IPO. So I would say this is the first real test of AI valuations hitting public markets.
The news is that Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the SEC.
They've said this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. The Wall Street Journal reported the same, saying it's setting it on a path to go public as early as this fall. This sets up a race with OpenAI, which is reported to be preparing its own confidential filing in the coming weeks, also targeting fall, according to both Fortune and Bloomberg. And it's part of a white-hot IPO season because we also have SpaceX coming, targeting a $2 trillion valuation for their fundraise. So, there are a lot of numbers flying around about this. Some of them somehow are already outdated. Zero X Reflection made the point that the 20 billion revenue number is outdated. So the real last valuation that we've heard is 965 billion post money from the Series H that is from Anthropic and TechCrunch. And that real revenue is allegedly 47 billion annualized as of early May from Simon Willison. But of course, we haven't seen all of the details on those things. The S1 is confidential. So take that with a grain of salt in all different directions.
Open AI for comparison is allegedly 852 billion with a 24 to 25 billion run rate. So let's quickly lay out bull and bear and then, Ram, I want your view on this. But the bull case is Anthropic's revenue appears to be real and growing.
It's nearly 10x year over year. It's nearing an operating profit. Both PIMCO and BlackRock were saying the CAPEX cycle there is still accelerating. On the bear side, you have Apollo's Torsten Slock, you have B of A's Michael Hartnett, you have Michael Burry with Berrien Critiques. Burry specifically that this feels like the last months of the 99 and 2000 bubble, questioning some of the circular accounting at places like Nvidia that are warehousing revenue here, Apollo and B of A are pointing out that there is a huge amount of concentration in the S&P 500 and Torsten Slock in particular saying they are more overvalued than they were in the 90s. I was just saying with the Anthropic IPO coming, they have had both 10x revenue growth but also a valuation already nearing a trillion dollars. How would you even think about this as an IPO investor right now?