The world’s best investor is… a FRAUD

There’s a fuzzy-haired, sheepish-looking guy in a low-security federal prison near Santa Barbara who made one of the best investments of the decade.

He just doesn’t get to keep any of it because he’s a massive fraud.

In April 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) put $500 million of FTX money into Anthropic’s Series B funding round. That bought about 445 million shares at $1.123 each, once you adjust for September’s 10-for-one split.

SBF was convicted on seven fraud and conspiracy counts in November 2023, and a judge sentenced him to 25 years. In June, an appeals court threw out his bid to overturn the conviction, and he’s since asked Donald Trump for a pardon… but it never came.

The Anthropic shares went to the FTX estate, which sold them to pay creditors. It sold two-thirds in March 2024 for $884 million, then the rest that June for more than $450 million.

That’s about $1.3 billion, all at $30 a share, or $3 in today’s terms.

Anthropic filed papers this week detailing its impending IPO. And the $1.5 trillion valuation investors are now discussing puts those FTX shares at about $39.4 billion.

So, was Sam Bankman-Fried the best investor in the world?

On this one, near enough.

He turned $500 million into 79 times his money in four and a half years. Not bad for a fraud.

But while SBF may have “won big” (even if he doesn’t see a penny of it), he’s not even close to being the biggest winner when Anthropic goes public.

That title will go to Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), which is about to hold an eye-watering value in Anthropic shares.

In fact, it stands to win twice from this juggernaut AI IPO.

Forty cents became two dollars

Last year, Anthropic made $4.58 billion in revenue while spending $7.3 billion on compute and infrastructure.

In the first quarter of 2025, Anthropic made 40 cents for every dollar it spent on compute.

Then it was 57 cents for every dollar of compute.

Then 68 cents.

Then 69 cents by the end of 2025.

Then it went parabolic.

It hit $1.40 in the first quarter of this year and $2.08 in the second quarter, on $11.6 billion of revenue compared to $5.6 billion spent on compute.

That’s a fivefold jump in 18 months.

According to the IPO filing:

Our compute efficiency is demonstrated by revenue that grew 1,368% year over year for the three months ended June 30, 2026 compared to compute and infrastructure expenses that grew 300% during the same period.

Below a dollar, every new customer costs Anthropic money to serve, and above it, every customer helps pay for the next model. And while the company is running at a heavy loss, most of it is accounting.

Operationally, it’s turning about a $1.6 billion profit.

Now, AI bears will continue to say there’s too much compute buildout and not enough customer demand to fill that supply.

Nonsense.

Compute is booked 12 to 18 months before it switches on, so new data centres exist before the customers arrive.

But oh boy, do they arrive!

As of 30 September, net revenue retention was about 900%.

What does 900% mean in plain English?

Let’s start with every business that spent money with Anthropic in the third quarter of 2025. In the third quarter of this year, those same businesses spent nine times as much.

That’s within 12 months… and it leaves out the flat-fee Pro and Max subscribers (like me).

Customers paying $100,000 a year or more went from about 950 to more than 11,900 in a year.

More than 1,900 now pay over $1 million, and about 250 pay over $10 million.

Better still, Fortune 500 firms spending $100,000 or more with Anthropic spent an average of less than 0.1% of their total costs on it in the third quarter.

Even the top 10 spent less than 1%, so they’ve barely started spending big on AI.

On top of this, Anthropic says the real gap is that people are only using a tiny fraction of what Claude can actually do.

We’ve barely unlocked the full potential of what’s already available.

Amazon gets paid three ways

Back to Amazon… because Anthropic is a beast.

At the $1.5 trillion valuation investors are discussing, that’s $88.56 a share. Amazon’s notes alone would be worth $284 billion, or 31 times what it lent.

Add the $10 billion of preferred shares it bought in the second quarter, and the total comes to about $309 billion.

That’s roughly 21% of Anthropic, and 17 times Amazon’s $18 billion investment.

It’s also about 10% of Amazon’s entire market cap.

And while Amazon owns a healthy chunk of Anthropic, don’t forget that in April, Anthropic agreed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS through April 2036, securing up to five gigawatts of new capacity.

Trainium2 through to Trainium4 chips are included in the deal, too. The commitment stands “regardless of actual usage,” and if Anthropic spends less, it pays Amazon the difference.

That’s about $11 billion a year, locked in for a decade.

What the filing also reveals is that Amazon and Google’s cloud marketplaces accounted for 47% of Anthropic’s revenue in 2025 and 48% in the first half of this year.

The filing explains how that money moves:

These platforms bill end customers, collect payments on our behalf, and remit such amounts to us, net of applicable platform and other fees.

Amazon takes a cut on the way in, and then Anthropic spends what’s left back on AWS.

Amazon has also agreed to lend up to $15 billion more, in $5 billion tranches, as compute gets delivered.

Amazon is a shareholder, landlord, shopkeeper, and rival all at once. That works while Claude keeps winning. And it adds even more value to Amazon.

Anthropic is expected to list as soon as 19 or 20 November.

For now, it makes more sense to look at Amazon at $249 a share than to scramble for ANT stock on IPO day.

There will be some wild hype around it, but ultimately, not a single mega IPO this year has immediately ripped out of the gates.

I don’t expect this to be any different. But I do expect a better buying opportunity for Anthropic within the next 12 months, and for long-term investors, it could present an attractive entry point.

Just don’t chase the hype.

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Investment Director, Southbank Investment Research

PS Anthropic’s IPO is just the latest reminder of how quickly AI is reshaping the investment landscape. But what if you could use AI itself to help spot the opportunities others are missing? Next Tuesday, 3 November, at 4 pm, I’m broadcasting my interview with a former MIT AI scientist who’s developed an investment system unlike anything I’ve seen before. He’s notoriously private, and this is his first face-to-face interview in more than 13 years. Now, he reveals how it works, why it challenges a long-held investing belief, and one of its highest-conviction stock ideas. You can join us completely free of charge. Book your place here.

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