SG Scott Galloway Scott Galloway Professor of marketing at NYU Stern and author of bestselling books including The Four and The Algebra of Wealth.

“This may be the first IPO where the risk factor is not our business might fail, but our business model might succeed beyond our ability to control it. I've never read that before. … This doesn't feel like an S1. It feels like a hostage note with a cap table.”

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“This may be the first IPO where the risk factor is not our business might fail, but our business model might succeed beyond our ability to control it. I've never read that before. … This doesn't feel like an S1. It feels like a hostage note with a cap table.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway)

Galloway was reacting to the leaked IPO filing from Anthropic. He had just run through its figures as he read them: large losses, very large commitments to future computing capacity, and more pages on risks than on the business. Kara Swisher had summed up the pitch as "we could kill you, but you need us to stop us".

Transcript

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) Around 23:15 into the episode
Scott Galloway

Well, let me, okay. So let me just try and set the table. They generated about $5 billion in revenue up 25 in 2025. That's up 12x, but they lost nearly 8 billion. The headline, 42 billion loss, is a bit of it, hasn't big asterisks because 34 billion of it is accounting charges. So maybe that's not relevant. It wants a valuation north of $2 trillion or roughly 435 times last year revenue. It's committed $518 billion in future compute infrastructure obligations. That's more than 110 years of its 2025 growth or revenue, excuse me. And then again, one quarter of revenue came from two customers, and 47% of sales were rooted through big tech partners that are simultaneously suppliers, investors, and potential competitors. As you noted, the prospectus devotes roughly 80 pages to risks and 48 pages to the business. That's remarkable. And the kicker here is that Anthropic says AI may cause catastrophic harm while arguing the solution is more powerful is a more powerful Anthropic AI. And Reuters identifies this exactly as this whole paradox of this whole movement right now. We could

Kara Swisher

kill you, but you need us to stop us from continuing.

Scott Galloway

But finance our IPO so we can stop. I'm a murderer, but I need you to give me to save me for myself and you. This may be the first IPO where the risk factor is not. Our business might fail, but our business model might succeed beyond our ability to control it. I've never read that before. It's sort of and usually, usually an S1, an S1 of this type of company says, here's how we make money. Here are the risks. That's typically what an S1 is supposed to do. Anthropics said, okay, we lose billions. We need half a trillion dollars of infrastructure and our product might kill you. Anyway, $2 trillion, please. It's just like, you use the right term. This doesn't feel like an S1. It feels like a hostage note with a cap table. And again, it goes back to this weird license we give to innovators. Around self-regulation and Scout's Honor, if Meta built a nuclear power plant, we wouldn't leave a post-it note saying a strongly worded post-it note on one of the reactors.

Kara Swisher

So, what would you do? Because it may go soaring upwards, right? Wall Street, on a tear, right? And the economy is relatively stable. The growth is relatively stable. So, what would you do here?

Scott Galloway

Oh, if you're a shareholder, you should be selling everything you can in the secondary markets. This market is so, first off, the IPO market is not strong. I made a prediction that Aura would have a successful IPO. I don't know if you saw it, but Aura actually pulled their IPO. So, the IPO market, I wouldn't say that's a chill, but it's definitely not as frothy as I thought. This other piece of shit, Softman company got pulled, but that was just ridiculous. That was like we work with a software or we work with a softman logo on it. And so, what I would be doing, if you're a shareholder and you can get $1.4 trillion in the secondary market, oh my God, sell everything because the multiple on revenues here, the fragility, the concentration of a customer base, not only the existential threats to humanity from Anthropic, but the existential threats that the market and regulation and the public and the media represent to Anthropic right now. If all of a sudden, I've said that I used this example before. I'm at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica. If an AI bot that said, here's incentive or be creative to shut off the lights, the signals for five minutes at the crossroads or the intersection between Santa Monica and Wilshire, if it was successful in doing that and eight cars crash, I think Congress might get whipped up into a frenzy and say, you guys need to shut all of this down for 14 days.

Kara Swisher

Yeah, especially if the Democrats sees the Senate, like it'll be Elizabeth Warren all day long doing a proctology exam of them. It literally would be Elizabeth Warren at her finest, right? Like with her. Oh,

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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