{"id":1180804,"date":"2026-09-01T15:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T15:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1180804\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T15:00:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T15:00:23","slug":"anthropic-and-spacex-are-making-their-wildest-promises-ever-for-their-ipos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1180804\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic and SpaceX are making their wildest promises ever for their IPOs."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

When Elon Musk was getting ready to take SpaceX public in June, the company advertised, in its government paperwork, the largest \u201ctotal addressable market\u201d in human history: $28.5\u00a0trillion per year, with $26.5\u00a0trillion (lol) attributed to artificial intelligence. A TAM is a company\u2019s assessment of all the money it could theoretically capture in every market it could serve. For an ice cream truck visiting a summer camp, the TAM is all the kids at the camp multiplied by how much ice cream each kid would buy that summer. A big TAM tells investors that capturing even a sliver of the market could mean a great business. SpaceX\u2019s claim is that its total addressable market is nearly 90 percent of the United States\u2019 gross domestic product<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This $28.5\u00a0trillion claim is a lot. Of course, Musk is a serial fabulist who says tons of things that don\u2019t pan out<\/a>, and he\u2019s also functionally not subject to the country\u2019s laws<\/a> while acting as the donor kingpin of Republican politics during a Republican presidency. But this $26.5\u00a0trillion claim<\/a> was still interesting, because it\u2019s not like that immunity from the law applies to all the lawyers and bankers doing the paperwork for him. They can\u2019t safely lie on Securities and Exchange Commission forms, and yet here those forms were.<\/p>\n

That realization hit again last week, when the Wall Street Journal reported that A.I. rival Anthropic will project a total addressable market of $30\u00a0trillion<\/a>. (The company already confidentially submitted its forms<\/a>, so we\u2019ll probably know soon.) SpaceX had barely finished making the most exorbitant market claim in capitalist history before word leaked that Anthropic would make a bigger one. \u201cA.I. company makes big, brash economic claim\u201d isn\u2019t surprising, but these stories were striking because of the medium involved. You can maybe get away with a lot of bullshitting in panel discussions and press releases, but these are documents filed with the SEC, and the titans of A.I. are not chilling out in this venue either. And whatever Musk can get away with because federal authorities now do whatever Donald Trump wants, Anthropic\u2019s situation is the reverse. This company gets special treatment the other way<\/a> because the big man doesn\u2019t like them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In theory, going public should be the moment when A.I. companies start talking in slightly more restrained terms so that they aren\u2019t sitting ducks for prosecution and civil suits. But rather than dialing anything back, the big players are just revving their engines more and more. This seems to present two options: You really can just say anything in an SEC filing now, or the barons of A.I. are somewhere between high on their own supply and under the sincere impression that they\u2019re about to own the world.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s room for marketing and hype here, sure. The SEC reviews paperwork to make sure it follows disclosure rules but doesn\u2019t weigh in on its accuracy. An estimate of a market size is not a promise to take over 100\u00a0percent of the market, and that leaves room for an over-the-top pitch. But investors can sue over \u201cmaterial\u201d falsehoods and omissions, and they often do. Calling something an estimate doesn\u2019t shield a company from scrutiny either. Not even two years ago, a much different SEC charged and settled with the biotech company Zymergen after the company claimed a $1\u00a0billion TAM while, the SEC said, its internal teams were projecting a market many times smaller than that. Former executives and insiders agreed to a $125\u00a0million settlement in a related class action<\/a>. All of this for a company that was way off on a $1\u00a0billion TAM projection. It makes you wonder what might support tens of trillions.<\/p>\n

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\n Nitish Pahwa
\n The Meme-Stock Economy Is Coming for Your 401(k)
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<\/a><\/p>\n

In SpaceX\u2019s case, Musk\u2019s people at least laid out their $28.5\u00a0trillion \u201cmath,\u201d and you could chuckle at how silly it was. Most of it was a $22.7\u00a0trillion estimate for A.I. enterprise applications, based on the value of the entire digital economy. (SpaceX admits that its A.I. cannot yet address this market in full.) There was also a TAM of $600\u00a0billion per year in \u201cdigital advertising,\u201d which the company noted was the entire world\u2019s digital advertising market in 2025 outside of Russia and China. SpaceX counted all of that as a market it could compete for, because the company owns what used to be Twitter. OK! That\u2019s Elon Musk!<\/p>\n

Anthropic will have to get to its own market projection without owning a declining microblogging platform, and until its documents are public, we won\u2019t know how the company justifies it. The Journal has offered a preview, saying the company is \u201clooking at the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models.\u201d Anthropic will also have to figure out how to sell A.I. without burning cash. (Anthropic\u2019s description of its current profitability will be very interesting.) But these guys are capturing a ridiculous volume of cash: an annualized rate of $47\u00a0billion as of May<\/a>, which isn\u2019t the same as money in the bank but could also undersell things if the company has grown. I think that if you are still insisting that every A.I. business will go up on smoke, it\u2019s time for an update. You are wishcasting rather than looking at the world as it is.<\/p>\n

Hardened priors go both ways, though. Anthropic is a real business that needs to justify extraordinary and frankly outrageous valuations and infrastructure spending to keep the party going. Projecting a market of (approximately) infinity dollars is one way to do that. Reuters noted that the big projection<\/a> would \u201canchor the growth story behind its planned IPO,\u201d a story the rest of us aren\u2019t obligated to tell.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
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    Silicon Valley Is Making Its Wildest Promises Ever. This Number From Anthropic Proves It.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But it is a new development that these companies are going public and now telling those growth stories in ways that are, in theory, more legally reviewable. A.I.\u2019s most famous people have habits of making big, bold assertions about the technology and then softening them over time. However, these walkbacks have tended to be easy to make, because they\u2019ve been in response to A.I. being less disruptive than they first projected. Sam Altman acknowledged on a podcast this week that \u201cwe\u2019ve all been too ambitious on the timelines,\u201d but he was able to talk softly about how that was a good thing<\/a>. In the spring, he explained<\/a> he was \u201cdelighted to be wrong\u201d about A.I. taking more people\u2019s jobs. The past half-decade of lofty A.I. statements has come without many consequences, because when they\u2019ve been wrong, they\u2019ve been wrong in ways that seem good for society. They\u2019ve often come from people at private companies whose investors were not going to sue them even if they thought they had a good reason.<\/p>\n

    This is a slightly different frontier, where big claims are tied to newly public companies that could cause immediate havoc if they do poorly. Anthropic\u2019s forthcoming projection seems to be that it can be unlike anything that\u2019s ever existed in business. If a company tells the world its total addressable market is $30\u00a0trillion, it might not have to bring in $30\u00a0trillion to look like an honest broker. But it should probably become one of the most impressive businesses ever, right? If not, wouldn\u2019t that invite pretty harsh recriminations from either aggrieved investors or motivated regulators and prosecutors? At the least, those responses seem more likely than if the boss were tossing around vagaries on a podcast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1180805,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,1700,4806,53,16,15],"class_list":["post-1180804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-economy","tag-silicon-valley","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117196387206695674","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1180805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}