Wait, How Many New Billionaires From This IPO?

**Brian** (0:00)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to The Daily AI Show. Today is June 2nd, 2026 Appreciate y'all being here. I think this is 735, 737 I like the airplane, 737
Flown in many of those in my life. So glad you're here. We have Andy. Anne is with us today. Beth is with us today. I'm Brian. We'll see if anybody else pops in the door, but we already have a good set of cast of characters to get this conversation rocking and rolling about AI. Now, I'll just throw it out there because I know it's one of the things we'll talk about. One of the biggest news that came out of yesterday and a bit of a surprise, was that Anthropic put out their initial filings for an IPO. I don't believe they've set a price yet, but this is interesting because at least in my impression, they were going to be later in the year. I was expecting them to be actually after OpenAI and SpaceX.
But here they are putting their foot down and saying, we want to lead this, we want to be the first. It appears that way.
And so very interesting because this would be, we're assuming a one trillion plus, Andy, I know you had talked about this, but we're assuming it to be north of one trillion for this initial IPO. And while that is a story, but we've been talking about this on the show, I was trying to think about a different angle to this. And so I want to see if you guys, okay. So we know IPO's meant millionaires and billionaires. We've seen it before. Okay.
Let's talk about some folks who are going to do just fine from Anthropics current IPO. So if we take a normal, we'll call it one trillion, and you say, what is it?
0.1% of that is one million or one billion, one billion, right? And you sort of work the numbers out from there. Yeah, it's worth, well, evaluation of one trillion, 0.1% of the company is worth one billion. That alone should wrap your head around how many dollars are one trillion, 1.1 is one billion, right? So that's a very small percentage of the company. So then you got to look at, well, who are the players here? Well, we hear some of these players all the time. Dario and Daniella.
I'm Modi, yeah, I was going to say it wrong. So you know I'll mess up some of these names. Some of these names are easy though, so I'm not going to mess them up.
The brother and sister founders of Anthropic, and we'll get to their histories here in a second, but let's stay with Anthropic. Then you have Tom Brown, co-founder Jack Clark, Jerry Kaplan. We've heard that name a little bit more recently. Sam McCandlish and Chris Ola, who we've also heard the name. I would say Chris for me, Dario and Daniela and Jared are the ones that I'm more familiar with. I actually had not heard these other names, but sometimes what part did a co-founder play, right? But that's just your co-founders. These are the people who are most certainly going to be billionaires if they already, and by the way, some of these people already have billionaire, sort of like they are kind of already minted billionaires and millionaires pre-IPO in a lot of ways, and that's more complicated than worth for this story. So you have those people. Then in addition, you have very small number of early non-founder executives. You have an early CFO or head of engineering, right? We, I Anthropic had all these people in it. Then you have early institutional investors, which is a little different, but you got your people who are going to do the companies like Sequoia, Altimeter, Dragoneer, Green Oaks. I haven't heard of most of those except for Sequoia. Oftentimes, you'll hear them as part of valuations and raising money and stuff. Obviously, they're not getting away free money. Those companies are also hoping to turn it an investment, right? Turn a profit. If we just look at this and break this down, you have quite a few people. In actual, if I look down at our little chart, this is all perplexity helping me out with this. You have Dario, tens of billions, most likely, okay? Daniella, same. Other five co-founders, absolutely billionaire territory for all five of those. Earliest senior execs, high nine figures to low billions. That's the early senior execs, so not founders. First hundred employees, you're looking to low to mid deca millionaire, meaning 10 plus million on there. Still talking about lots of money. So just being an early employee, depending on what your options were and how you signed up for, how you started working with Anthropic, if you were early, early in, you also probably are standing to make tens of millions of dollars depending on your situation. We know this because some of this, for other companies, has become public and in some cases it's actually public in court, how many shares certain people hold. So we can connect the dots here a little bit. Then you have mid tenure ICs and managers, three to 30 million. Late stage hires, still plausible, one to five million. That's late stage, maybe within the last year or so because Anthropic has had a skyrocket. Now, I don't want to stay on this too long. I did ask for backgrounds on Tom, Jack, Jared, Sam, and Chris because of the people I don't know. What's the common thread with most of them? Open AI. What does that mean? Guess who's also going to make anywhere from millions to trillions because they were early folks at Open AI. When Open AI has an IPO this year, which we're assuming they will, also in and around the $1 trillion mark, so potentially very similar, you're looking at quite a few people, especially the early co-founders of Anthropic, who are also either co-founders or early, early inside of Open AI. Dario himself was very instrumental in judging between 2 and 3, but it goes deep, guys. It's like the list is there.