Find how Burry prices Anthropic against S&P 500 stocks, including the multiples, revenue or growth assumptions, and comparison companies he uses.

Michael Burry does not price Anthropic on a sales or earnings multiple. In an October 8, 2026 post, he prices it as a pile of cash large enough to buy 78 profitable S&P 500 companies, then contrasts that pile with UPS’s 1999 IPO, which he puts at 26 times earnings and 2.4 times sales. He publishes no Anthropic revenue, margin, or growth assumption. The only explicit multiples in the post belong to UPS.

What Burry actually did

The mechanism is a market-cap shopping list, not a valuation model. On X as Cassandra Unchained, he wrote that “a fun game in times like these” is to count how many profitable S&P 500 firms “the bubble private company valuation” can buy. His count for Anthropic is 78. Named examples are Domino’s, Clorox, J.M. Smucker, Stanley Black & Decker, Deckers, Lululemon, McCormick, Tractor Supply, NVR, Albemarle, FedEx Freight, News Corp, Alliant Energy, Kimco, Hormel, Weyerhaeuser, DaVita, Zimmer Biomet, Lennox, Masco, A.O. Smith, MGM, Wynn, Brown-Forman, Norwegian Cruise Line, and Huntington Ingalls, “and many more.” He did not publish the full 78, the market-cap source, or the Anthropic figure used in the sum. Secondary coverage maps the exercise to the May private round at $965 billion. [1] [2]

The only multiples he states are historical, and they are UPS’s, not Anthropic’s: the largest inflation-adjusted pre-IPO valuation of 1990–2000 was UPS at $119 billion, then 92 years old, “26 times earnings at a net margin of about 8.6%, 2.4x sales.” [1] In a June Substack comment after the May round, he wrote there was “no guarantee, and not even a strong likelihood,” that Anthropic is long-term worth anywhere near $1 trillion. [2] That is a judgment about durability, not a published forecast.

Independent check of his inputs

The $965 billion mark is company-confirmed, not a Burry invention. On May 28, 2026, Anthropic said it raised $65 billion in Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, including $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler money. The same announcement said run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion earlier that month, up from $14 billion in February and about $9 billion at the end of 2025. [3] [4] [5] Reported IPO talk since then is $1.5–2 trillion, not a priced deal. Reuters has described a sought valuation of more than $2 trillion; an October 16 secondary report said investor-day discussion had drifted toward about $1.5 trillion. Treat both as reported targets. [6] [7] [8]

The UPS math is in the right neighborhood, not exact. At the November 1999 offer price of $50, contemporaneous reports put equity value a little above $60 billion on a sale of about 9% of the company. [9] [10] First-day close was about $81–82 billion. [11] [12] CNN reported trailing net income of $1.95 billion through September 30, 1999, a P/E of 28 at the offer and almost 38 at the close, and trailing revenue of $26.3 billion. [13] Offer-price value over that sales figure is about 2.3 times, close to Burry’s 2.4 times. His 26 times earnings is near CNN’s 28 times, not a match to 1998 net income of about $1.7 billion, which would have implied a mid-30s multiple at the offer. [11] CPI-U was 336.940 in September 2026. [14] Roughly doubling a ~$60 billion 1999 offer value lands near his $119 billion. He appears to be inflating the offer-price equity value, not the first-day close. Age (92) matches the 1907 founding cited at the time. [15]

The 78-company average is the bottom of the index, which is the tell. $965 billion divided by 78 is about $12.4 billion per name. That lines up with the companies he bothered to name, not with a typical S&P 500 firm:

• Domino’s: about $9.9–10.0 billion market cap, trailing P/S about 2.0, trailing P/E about 16.7, on about $5.1 billion of revenue and about $609 million of net income (mid-October 2026). [16]
• Clorox: about $10.1–10.4 billion. [17] [18]
• Hormel: about $11.1 billion. [19]
• J.M. Smucker: about $12.8 billion; McCormick: about $12.3 billion, in the same peer table. [19]

He listed Clorox twice and misspelled several names. The sum is not auditable from the post. “FedEx Freight” is also an odd index name relative to FedEx itself. The game works because he is shopping the small profitable tail.

Revenue base versus the price he is attacking

Burry’s post contains no revenue assumption. Public estimates, which should stay labeled as such because the prospectus is still confidential, move the multiple a lot depending on which base you use.

Item	Figure	Status	Implied multiple
May 28, 2026 post-money	$965 billion; $65 billion raised	Company-confirmed [3] [4]	—
Run rate at that round	Crossed $47 billion in May	Company-stated [4]	About 20.5x that run rate at $965 billion
2025 revenue	Nearly $4.6 billion, ~12x 2024	Leaked draft prospectus via Reuters [6]	About 210x at $965 billion; PitchBook puts $2 trillion at about 435x 2025 sales [20]
2025 operating loss	$8.06 billion; compute spend $7.33 billion	Reuters on the draft filing [6]	Not meaningful as a P/E
2025 GAAP net loss	About $42 billion, of which about $34 billion was a non-cash charge on financing that can convert into shares	Reuters [6]	Do not use as cash burn
Q1 / Q2 2026 revenue	About $4.7 billion, then about $11.5 billion	Draft filing / subsequent reporting [20] [21]	$2 trillion is under 44x annualized Q2, per PitchBook [20]
Late-July run rate	$65 billion annualized	Reuters, cited again Oct 15 [7]	About 14.8x at $965 billion; just under 31x at $2 trillion [20]
Q3 2026 revenue	$16.8 billion, up about 45% from Q2, vs about 145% the prior quarter	Investor meeting, people familiar, Reuters Breakingviews, Oct 15 [7] [22]	Flat annualization ≈ $67 billion; about 14.4x at $965 billion, about 30x at $2 trillion
Adjusted profit / gross margin	Second straight adjusted profit; GAAP gross margin 85% in the year through September, vs 40% in 2025; $1.70 of revenue per compute dollar	Same investor-meeting reporting [7] [23]	Unaudited; not a public filing
Compute obligations	About $518 billion over coming years, ~80% non-cancellable or payable regardless of use	Reuters on the draft filing [6] [24]	The number Burry’s shopping list does not touch
Sought IPO value	Up to about $2 trillion; some Oct 14 discussion nearer $1.5 trillion	Reported targets, not a price [6] [8]	~22–30x a ~$67 billion Q3 annualization

S&P 500 context, also as of mid-October 2026: FactSet’s forward 12-month P/E was 19.1 on October 11, equal to the 10-year average and below the 5-year average of 19.8. [25] Multpl’s price-to-sales ratio was 3.82 on October 15, but that series is estimated off sales through September 2025, so it lags the 2026 earnings boom. [26] Nvidia, the obvious public AI comp Burry did not use, was around 17–18 times trailing sales, with trailing P/E near 27–29 and forward P/E in the high teens, on about $303 billion of trailing revenue. [27] [28] Median public SaaS/cloud is a different planet: about 4.2 times revenue on the SaaS Capital and Clouded Judgement reads in late September 2026, with only the fastest growers in the high teens and a handful (Palantir, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare) still above 30–40 times forward sales. [29] [30] [31]

Where the framing is vulnerable

The comparison is built to maximize the gap. Staples and industrials at roughly 2 times sales look like UPS in 1999. They are not the peer set a growth investor is using. Against Nvidia’s high-teens sales multiple, a $965 billion price on a $65–67 billion run rate is in the same zip code, not eight times “the market.” Against median software at ~4 times, or the S&P at ~3.8 times sales and ~19 times forward earnings, it is still a large premium. Burry never makes that distinction, so the post reads as if every dollar of S&P equity is a Clorox dollar.

He also freezes the private mark and ignores the revenue base that moved under it. The $965 billion round was struck when the company itself was citing a $47 billion run rate. By the time he posted on October 8, Reuters had already reported a $65 billion late-July run rate. A week later, investor-day figures put the quarter at $16.8 billion. Using 2025’s $4.6 billion makes Anthropic look absurd (hundreds of times sales). Using the current run rate makes the May mark about 15 times sales. Both can be true. A valuation argument that never states the denominator cannot be stress-tested.

The profitability contrast is partly real and partly a snapshot. UPS was an 8–9% net-margin compounder. Anthropic’s 2025 GAAP loss of ~$42 billion is a bad headline for this purpose: Reuters says about $34 billion was a non-cash revaluation of convertible financing, while the operating loss was $8.06 billion on $4.6 billion of revenue. [6] By the second and third quarters of 2026, the same reporting trail describes a second adjusted operating profit and an 85% gross margin. Those claims are unaudited and came from a roadshow. They do mean “zero earnings forever, therefore worth the staples basket” is no longer the clean argument. The cleaner one is the $518 billion of mostly non-cancellable compute obligations against customers who, on the draft filing, can often cut spending. [6] [24] Burry’s game does not price that liability.

Three structural mismatches remain even if the 78-count is arithmetically fair:

• Last-trade market caps are not takeover prices. Buying 78 public companies would require control premiums. The $965 billion figure is a negotiated private round, not a bid for the whole company in the open market. Neither side of the “buys” verb is a real transaction.
• The named basket is the cheap tail. An equal-weighted grab of ~$12 billion names says nothing about how the S&P 500’s earnings and sales are actually distributed. You can “buy” 78 profitable firms and still own a rounding error of index earnings.
• The AI capex loop is inside the index he is using as the alternative. Reported commitments include on the order of $110 billion to Amazon, $111 billion to Alphabet, and $31 billion to Microsoft. [24] Anthropic’s private mark and the mega-caps’ public marks are not independent claims on separate economies.

The vulnerability that has shown up since the post is growth, not the shopping list. Reuters Breakingviews notes quarter-on-quarter growth slowed from about 145% to about 45%, with August and September averaging about $5.7 billion a month versus a July pace implied by the $65 billion run rate of roughly $5.4 billion. Usage can rise while token prices fall. A $2 trillion ask is about 30 times a run rate that is no longer compounding at the rate that justified the May round’s reputation. [7] That is a harder critique than “this equals 78 staples companies,” and it is not the one Burry wrote down.

Bottom line for anyone using his frame: treat $965 billion / 78 as a rhetorical equal-weighted tail comparison, internally consistent with ~$10–13 billion names, and treat 26x / 2.4x / 8.6% as a 1999 UPS benchmark that is roughly right on sales and inflation if you start from the ~$60 billion offer-price equity value. Do not treat it as an Anthropic multiple, a growth model, or a statement about the S&P 500’s own valuation. On publicly estimated current run-rate math, the May mark is about 15 times sales and a $2 trillion IPO hope is about 30 times — rich versus the index and versus median software, ordinary versus the dearest AI and security names, and still untested against $518 billion of fixed compute.

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Recent Findings Supplement (October 2026)

Michael Burry (as @michaeljburry / Cassandra Unchained on X, early October 2026) highlighted Anthropic’s ~$965 billion May 2026 private valuation as equivalent to the aggregate market value of 78 profitable S&P 500 companies, framing it as a bubble indicator via a “fun game” of comparing private valuations to established public firms.[1][2]

He listed examples including Domino’s, Clorox, J.M. Smucker, Stanley Black & Decker, Deckers, Lululemon, McCormick, Tractor Supply, NVR, Albemarle, News Corp, Alliant Energy, Kimco Realty, Hormel, Weyerhaeuser, DaVita, Zimmer Biomet, Lennox, Masco, A.O. Smith, MGM, Wynn, Brown-Forman, Norwegian Cruise Line, and Huntington Ingalls (among others). He benchmarked against the largest inflation-adjusted pre-IPO valuation from 1990–2000: UPS at $119 billion (company age 92; 26x earnings at ~8.6% net margin; 2.4x sales). Anthropic (founded 2021) received no explicit revenue, growth, or per-company multiple assumptions in the post—only the aggregate valuation comparison.[3][4]

This October 2026 commentary is the primary recent development matching the query; no earlier 2026 Burry statements on Anthropic pricing appear in results.

Anthropic’s latest reported/estimated financials (mid-to-late 2026 updates shared with investors) show rapid but decelerating revenue growth amid high infrastructure commitments and a shift toward adjusted profitability.[5]

• 2025 full-year revenue: ~$4.6 billion (roughly 12x growth from ~$400 million in 2024); operating loss ~$8 billion; net loss ~$42 billion (majority from accounting charges).[6]
• Q2 2026 revenue: ~$11.5–11.6 billion. Late July 2026 annualized run rate: >$65 billion.[7]
• Q3 2026 (Jul–Sep): $16.8 billion revenue (up ~45–46% QoQ); adjusted operating margin ~11%; positive cash flow; high gross margins (reported ~85% in one period). Run-rate estimates now ~$67–74 billion annualized (some investor targets previously >$100 billion by year-end now seen as short).[8][9]
• IPO context: Confidential filing; targeting November 2026 listing (post-midterms) at $1.8–2 trillion valuation (vs. $965 billion May private round). Compute/infrastructure commitments: $518 billion over coming years (large non-cancellable portion to cloud providers).[1]

These figures are publicly estimated/reported via investor briefings and media (e.g., Reuters, FT).

S&P 500 valuation metrics (October 2026 data) show median trailing P/E around 23x and forward P/E near 19x, with variation by source and equal-weighted vs. cap-weighted views.[10]

• Recent snapshots: forward P/E ~19.1–19.2x (down from earlier 2026 levels); median constituent trailing P/E ~23.2x; tech sector forward multiples compressed.[11]
• Broader context includes elevated long-term metrics (e.g., P/E10) but earnings growth supporting prices amid multiple contraction.

Comparison table (Burry framing vs. independent public estimates; all Anthropic/S&P figures labeled as publicly estimated/reported):

• Valuation basis (Burry): $965B (May 2026 private round) buys 78 profitable S&P 500 firms (examples listed above). UPS historical: $119B pre-IPO (2.4x sales, 26x earnings).[3]
• Anthropic valuation (public est.): $965B private; targeting $1.8–2T IPO (~30x recent ~$67B run-rate sales).[7]
• Anthropic revenue/growth (public est.): 2025: $4.6B; Q3 2026: $16.8B (~45% QoQ, implying ~$67B+ annualized run-rate); growth decelerating from prior quarters.[8]
• Anthropic multiples/profitability (public est.): Not directly addressed by Burry. Implied high sales multiples at IPO target; recent adjusted profitability (op. margin ~11%) but prior GAAP losses and heavy capex.[5]
• S&P 500 context (public est.): Median ~23x trailing P/E; ~19x forward P/E. Burry’s 78 firms are profitable established businesses (implied lower growth/margin stability vs. Anthropic).[10]

Burry’s framing is vulnerable on several points (my analysis of the data): It equates a high-growth, early-stage AI firm’s private valuation to the summed market caps of mature, profitable, lower-growth S&P companies without adjusting for growth differentials, margins, or risk profiles—Anthropic’s revenue trajectory (even if slowing) and adjusted profitability path contrast with the stable but slower UPS benchmark or typical listed peers.[12] However, it highlights real risks: massive non-cancellable compute commitments, customer concentration potential, AI price competition eroding margins, and a $2T IPO target implying multiples that assume sustained hyper-growth and high profitability not yet fully demonstrated in GAAP terms. S&P multiples have also compressed recently, but earnings support remains tied to broader economic factors rather than AI-specific execution. No direct rebuttal or updated Burry details post his post appear in results.