In 2019, Uber went public and told investors it was targeting a $6 trillion market.
The number was calculated by taking the total mileage value of every private car and every bus and train on earth and adding it all up… all on the assumption that Uber might eventually replace all of it.
Uber's stock took 4 years to recover past it’s IPO price.
I mention this because Anthropic (the company that makes Claude)… is expected to file for its IPO in the coming weeks, and it is planning to tell investors that its total addressable market (TAM) exceeds $30 trillion.
To put that number in context…
Every tech company in the S&P 1500 combined generated $2.4 trillion in revenue last year. All 191 of them.
Anthropic's theoretical market is 12x larger than that entire sector's output.
SpaceX, which went public in June, set what the Wall Street Journal described at the time as a new record with its own TAM claim of $28.5 trillion, most of which it attributed to AI opportunities.
That was batshit insane… and 3 months later SpaceX is trading 15% below it’s IPO level and 30% below it’s week 1 peak.
And yet Anthropic's TAM number is larger still.
The $30 trillion figure tells you that Anthropic’s bankers have worked out the broadest possible definition of "work that AI models could theoretically complete" and assigned revenue figures to every category.
Whether that work will actually flow through Anthropic… at what margin… over what time period… is a question the TAM figure is specifically designed not to answer.
What we can answer that that Anthropic doubled its revenue in Q2 reaching and now has a legitimate $65B ARR.
That is a real business growing fast… but with the company is reportedly aiming for a $2 trillion valuation at IPO that’s still a HUGE ask.
If you genuinely believe the company will eventually capture even a fraction of the $30 trillion number they’re waving around… then a $2 trillion valuation seems modest.
But for me, it’s the same story as SpaceX
Anthropic may well be a transformative business… the technology is real (I use Claude every day) and the revenue growth is genuine… but it still could trade sideways for multiple years as a public company… just like Uber did.
So I won’t be buying at IPO…
Oliver