To The Moon

Mathematical Money | November 12, 2026

Anthropic's amended prospectus, filed on 10 November, offers 825 million shares at $70 to $78. The company's own investor material says the price is expected to be set on 18 November, with trading on Nasdaq expected the next day under the ticker ANT. None of that is final. The filing itself says it "is not complete and may be changed".

Here is the part that caught me. $ZM$, the video-call company, carries an Anthropic stake at $3.13 billion in its last quarterly filing. Zoom's whole market value at the 11 November close was $28.6 billion. So if you own Zoom, about 11% of what you paid for is Anthropic.

I hold no Anthropic exposure worth the name, and this post is not a view on whether to buy the listing. It is a check you can run on any hot IPO, because the most-watched new stock of the year is often already sitting inside stocks that have traded for years.

The look-through check

Step one. Find who already owns it. The prospectus names the large holders, and each listed holder's own quarterly filing gives a carrying value. Step two. Value the stake. Shares times the IPO price where the count is disclosed, or the carrying value where it is not.

Step three. Divide by the holder's market value. That is how much of the stock you already own is really the new company. Step four. Compare it with what is already in the holder's accounts, because a gain that was booked last quarter is not news next week.

Step five. Read the strings attached. Voting rights, ownership caps and lock-ups decide what the stake is good for.

Running it on Anthropic

$AMZN$ first, because it is the largest. The prospectus has Amazon holding about 1.92 billion non-voting shares after the listing. A further 1.56 billion can be issued on notes it has not yet converted. At the $74 midpoint that is roughly $258 billion, and you can rebuild the figure from the two filings in a few minutes.

Amazon is valued at about $2.88 trillion. So the stake is 9% of Amazon. For every $1,000 of Amazon you hold, about $90 is Anthropic.

Now step four, which is where it gets interesting. Amazon's 30 September accounts already carry the stake at $238.7 billion. The bottom of the IPO range marks it 2% above that. The top marks it 14% above. Most of the gain is on the books already.

Alphabet is next, with about 1.79 billion shares after buying more in a private sale alongside the listing. At the midpoint that is $132 billion, or 3.7% of Alphabet. Salesforce carries $5.1 billion, about 2.8% of its value.

Then Zoom at 11%, the biggest share of the lot. And one more number on Zoom: it holds $7.25 billion of cash and securities besides. Add the stake and more than a third of Zoom's market value is not the video business at all.

Did owning the holders pay?

This is the check on the check. Anthropic said on 1 June that it had filed in draft. Zoom jumped 9.9% that day.

Since then Anthropic's price per share has gone up. Its May funding round works out near $59 a share on my arithmetic, and the range now starts at $70.

The holders went the other way. From the last close before that announcement to 11 November, Zoom is down 3.5%. Amazon is down 1.7%. Alphabet is down 22.8%. The S&P 500 is up 0.5%.

So the look-through was real and it still did not carry the stock. Nine tenths of Amazon is something else, and the something else moved more. Worth remembering the next time a headline says a stock is "the way to play" a listing.

What the filing says against it

I want the risks at full weight, so here they are in the company's own numbers, and you can find each one in the prospectus yourself. Float. The 825 million shares are about 6% of the roughly 13.1 billion that will be outstanding. A small float can move a long way in either direction on little money.

Supply. Up to about 1.6 billion more shares can come free within 76 days of listing, under the staged lock-up. That is nearly twice the float. A further 351 million or so shares, sold privately to suppliers and partners, carry no underwriter lock-up at all.

Control. One share held by the seven co-founders carries 50.1% of the votes. Everyone holding the listed class shares the other 49.9% between them. A separate trust elects four of the seven directors. The filing says this "may effectively eliminate" ordinary shareholders' influence over important decisions.

Commitments. The company has committed to about $900.9 billion of computing spend. Revenue for the first nine months of 2026 was $33.2 billion. About $70.7 billion falls due within twelve months, against $131.8 billion of cash and short-term investments.

Losses. The nine-month net loss was $104 billion. Most of that, $94.3 billion, is a non-cash change in the value of notes and similar instruments. The operating loss was $1.26 billion. Both numbers are true and they describe very different companies, so be wary of anyone quoting only one.

Costs. Computing cost was 48% of revenue in the second quarter and 58% in the third. That moved the wrong way.

Circularity. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are suppliers, investors, customers and competitors at once. The buyers of $26 billion of stock alongside the listing include the companies that sell it chips and cloud capacity. The filing lists this as a risk.

There are legal and political items too: a $1.5 billion copyright settlement, an open regulatory inquiry and a national-security dispute still in the courts. And the top five customers were about a quarter of revenue.

What the filing says for it

Equal weight the other way. Nine-month revenue was $33.2 billion against $2.5 billion a year earlier. The company puts its run-rate at about $81 billion at the end of October, and warns that run-rate is not a forecast.

Cash from operations was positive, at $6.6 billion for the nine months. The operating loss shrank from $5.2 billion to $1.26 billion while revenue rose thirteen-fold. Baird's Ross Mayfield told CNBC on 11 November that demand for the listing was helping sentiment across AI stocks.

The base rate, for what ten cases are worth

I pulled ten large technology listings and measured from the first-day close, which is the price an ordinary buyer could actually get. Eight have traded a full year. Six of those were lower twelve months on: Facebook, Alibaba, Uber, Rivian, Figma and Klarna. Two were higher, Arm and CoreWeave, and both roughly doubled.

One thing all ten share, including this year's Cerebras and SpaceX. Every one traded below its first-day close at some point in its first year, and eight fell more than 30% below it. Ten cases is an anecdote and not a forecast. But if you are weighing a first-day purchase of any listing, it is the base rate you have, and it says the first day has rarely been the only chance.

A disclosure, since SpaceX is in that sample. I have a position in SpaceX, short the shares with puts sold against them, as one leg of a pair trade.

What nobody can know yet

The final price. Whether the range moves. How much of the float goes to retail. Who the largest customers are, because the filing does not name them. And Alphabet's own quarterly report never names Anthropic at all. It refers to "one private company", so even that 3.7% rests on the prospectus and not on Alphabet's word.

Also watch the headline valuation. Shares outstanding times the range gives about $916 billion to $1.02 trillion. The $1.4 trillion in the press counts options, staff awards and Amazon's unconverted notes. Both are fair. They are not the same number, so ask whether the one you are being quoted is the diluted one.

Where I stand

No position in Anthropic and none in Amazon, Alphabet, Zoom or Salesforce. I do hold long-dated calls on $AVGO$, which is buying $1.0 billion in the private sale. That is under 0.1% of Broadcom's value, so it is not why I own it. The prospectus also has Broadcom agreeing to lend up to $42 billion through convertible notes, which is the larger link and a risk as much as a prize.

The thing I keep turning over is step four. Amazon's stake was already marked within a few percent of the IPO range before the range existed. If the gain is in the accounts and the share price has gone nowhere since June, where exactly did it go? If you hold one of these names and have a cleaner way to see it, I would like to hear it.

Offering terms, share counts, voting and financials from Anthropic's amended S-1 of 10 November 2026 and its investor materials of 12 November. Stakes from Amazon's Q3 10-Q, Alphabet's Q3 10-Q, and the Zoom and Salesforce 10-Qs for the quarter to 31 July. Zoom, Amazon, Salesforce and Broadcom prices from Tiger daily bars to the 11 November close; Alphabet, the S&P 500, share counts and all ten listing histories from yfinance (Klarna's first-day close from press reports). Percentages of market value and the value of each stake at $74 are my own arithmetic.

$ZM$ $AMZN$ $GOOGL$

#Anthropic #IPO #AI #investing #stockmarket

Stop guessing. Start calculating.

Live to fight another day. 🤙