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SE Steve Eisman Steve Eisman Investor known for betting against the subprime mortgage market before the 2008 financial crisis, a story told in Michael Lewis's book The Big Short.

“It just seems that there are no moats around this business. If it's the case that they actually did cut prices by 50%, that would reinforce the concept that there are no moats and that the only way you're going to gain share is price. Being in a business where you are committed to spend $800 billion where your entire franchise is just simply based on price is dangerous.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · October 2026

“It just seems that there are no moats around this business. If it's the case that they actually did cut prices by 50%, that would reinforce the concept that there are no moats and that the only way you're going to gain share is price. Being in a business where you are committed to spend $800 billion where your entire franchise is just simply based on price is dangerous.” — Steve Eisman, Prof G Markets

Context

Ed Elson asked Eisman whether he would invest in Anthropic's IPO. Eisman said the bigger question than the S-1's numbers is whether the business has any moat at all; the 50% price cut he mentions is one he was treating as a report, not a confirmed fact.

Listen to the episode → More from Steve Eisman → More Money & Markets quotes →

Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 12:00 into the episode
Speaker 3

No.

Ed Elson

You got to the point quickly. I was going to ask you, would you need to know the answers to the questions that you just brought up before investing? I assume the answer is, yes, you would. Well,

Speaker 3

yes, but I think, look, to me, the bigger, the bigger, bigger, bigger question is it just seems that there are no moats around this business. I mean, if it's the case that they actually did cut prices by 50%, that would reinforce the concept that there are no moats and that the only way you're going to gain share is price. Being in a business where you are committed to spend $800 billion where your entire franchise is just simply based on price is dangerous.

Ed Elson

There is another interesting angle on this S1, which was the governance structure.

Speaker 3

Oh, please. It's ridiculous. I mean, what's there to talk about? You're a shareholder in this company. You have no rights. Okay. Let's move on. If you want to invest in that company, that's up to you. You know, it's been disclosed. You have no rights, zero rights. You want to play? Play. You don't…

Ed Elson

Just to clarify for our listeners, so there are multiple classes of stock here. You've got the regular voting shares. You've got the regular non-voting shares. Then you have this class T share, which is controlled by what they call the long-term benefit trust. And apparently, this is sort of this…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Prof G Markets

“Their business model is basically: we raise debt, we build AI data centers. That's it. That's the entire business model. And if they can't raise debt, they can't build AI data centers.” — Steve Eisman, Prof G Markets “This is as good as it looks from the standpoint of the business as currently structured. And now you go through this inflection that makes it much more capex intensive. … I think this was probably their best. And they know this. This is the best time to do it because the future business is going to be very different.” — Paul Kedrosky, Prof G Markets