Scott Galloway
Professor of marketing at NYU Stern and author of bestselling books including The Four and The Algebra of Wealth.
“Private markets are essentially opinions and public prices are facts… And essentially, private markets have become where valuations go to avoid accountability.”
Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · October 2026
Galloway, after noting that recent data-center IPOs asked public investors to pay "private market vibes" and were turned down. He went on to question whether public investors would pay around 30 times revenue for Anthropic at a $2 trillion valuation.
Transcript
When you look at the revenues of these companies, you would know AI is out there and supposedly going to just disrupt it all.
That's what we said when this all went down, though. Remember, like in February when the SaaS apocalypse happened, everyone said that those names were done. Like those were the AI losers.
…been cut in half in the last 20 years, either through acquisition or companies are just saying private longer. Why? Because why do we want more public companies? Private markets are. Essentially, opinions and public prices are facts. And the Pull Data Center IPOs, Fermis, SP Energy, they were asking public investors to continue to pay their private market vibes. And public investors said no. And essentially, private markets have become where valuations go to avoid accountability. Now, let's talk about Anthropic. $16.8 billion in quarterly revenue is roughly a $67 billion annual run rate. That's amazing. But at $2 trillion, that's about 30 times revenue for a company growing roughly 50% a quarter by these figures. And so again, the question is whether there's an amazing company. The technology, in my opinion, for AI is going to outlast the valuations, whether you think…
It needs to be based on financials. And so long as these companies don't release their financials properly, or if the only financials that we get to see are these sort of adjusted bullshit numbers, then it's still going to be completely a murky, opaque gray zone. And I think what you're pointing to…
Yeah, it's so interesting. By the way, I thought yesterday's episode that you did with Kodrowski and Sandy was just so good. And Kojowski pointed out that one of the miracles of the American market is capital formation. Someone did an analysis looking at private tech companies in Brazil, which is a…
Huge.
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