One percent of a company sounds like a rounding error until the company is Anthropic and the number attached to it is two trillion dollars. At that valuation the stake Eric Schmidt built in 2021 would be worth about 20 billion dollars, according to Bloomberg, which reported the holding on October 19 and attributed it to people familiar with the matter.
Nobody involved confirmed the figure. Hillspire, Schmidt’s family office, did not respond to a request for comment, and Bloomberg said it could not determine whether he has sold any shares since the first purchase. The disclosure, such as it is, comes from people who have seen the capitalization table of a company that has filed a draft registration statement and has not fixed a price or a date for its shares.
The check was small by the standards of the round. Anthropic raised 124 million dollars in its Series A in May 2021, a financing led by Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of Skype, with Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook among the participants. Schmidt put in tens of millions, according to the Bloomberg account. The company was valued at 461 million dollars at the time, a price that now reads like a typographical error.
The arithmetic since then is the whole story. Anthropic was valued at 965 billion dollars after its private round in May, which would put a one percent holding near 9.7 billion dollars. Potential public investors have discussed a range of 1.8 trillion to 2 trillion dollars, and at the top of that range the stake reaches 20 billion. Even the lower figure being floated by some shareholders, about 1.5 trillion dollars, leaves Schmidt with roughly 15 billion.
That last number moved this week. Reuters reported on Monday that some Anthropic investors were pushing for a valuation closer to 1.5 trillion dollars after a weaker third quarter. The 20 billion dollar figure is a function of that argument, not a fact about the business. Bloomberg has reported that marketing of the shares could begin as early as the week of November 9, with trading possible before Thanksgiving, and the company has not confirmed either date.
For a man whose net worth Bloomberg estimates at 57.5 billion dollars, the stake is not a curiosity. At the top of the range it would add more than 20 billion dollars to that total, and it would do so at a moment when the largest fortunes in technology are being repriced by the same handful of listings. The gain would be concentrated, illiquid until a lockup expires, and taxable in ways that a private holding is not.
What the stake does not buy is influence of the kind Schmidt once exercised. A one percent position in a company run by its founders and its largest backers is a financial claim, not a governing one. No board seat has been reported, and nothing in the disclosure suggests one was sought.
The portfolio around the position is worth noting. Through Innovation Endeavors and Hillspire, Schmidt has backed Mistral AI, Reflection AI and World Labs, three companies that compete for the same enterprise budgets as Anthropic. He also spent years warning publicly about the risks of frontier models, first as chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and later in his own writing. Holding a stake worth tens of billions in one of the two leading developers of those models does not contradict the warning, but it does complicate the teller.
The venture arithmetic is the part that travels. A 124 million dollar round priced at 461 million dollars produced, for its earliest backers, a return measured in thousands of percent, and the size of any single check mattered far less than the decision to write one at all. That is the power law that venture firms describe in their letters to investors and rarely demonstrate this cleanly. Tallinn, Moskovitz and Schmidt were buying an argument about AI safety in 2021, and the market has since decided the argument was worth two trillion dollars.
Skeptics have a different number. New Constructs, a research firm that publishes valuations of newly listed companies, has called the Anthropic offering the year’s most ridiculous and put the company’s value at 144 billion dollars, a figure that would make Schmidt’s holding worth about 1.4 billion. The gap between that estimate and the bankers’ range is not a disagreement about revenue growth. It is a disagreement about what a dollar of AI revenue is worth in perpetuity, and the listing will settle it for at least a day.
There are mechanics that will matter more to Schmidt than the headline number. Registration statements disclose selling shareholders, and a holder who wants liquidity before a lockup expires has to negotiate for it. Estate planning for a position this size usually involves trusts and charitable vehicles assembled years in advance, and none of that appears in a filing until it does.
The larger point is what a listing does to a private mark. Anthropic’s valuation has been set by a small number of rounds, at prices agreed by investors who were not selling. A public price is set by people who can sell every day, and it applies to every holder at once, including the ones who never appear in a press release. When the shares begin trading, Schmidt’s one percent stops being a rumor and becomes a line in a table that anyone can check.
Until then the number is 20 billion dollars, on paper, at a valuation that has not been agreed. The interesting thing about a stake that size is how little of it is his to spend this year.
