Jason M. Lemkin says AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI could create 100,000 new deca-millionaires. As wealth concentrates in Silicon Valley, housing becomes unaffordable for ordinary workers. He questions whether AI productivity will create more jobs or shrink the workforce.
That's our job, is to build these billion-dollar agents. If you can do something that is extremely high valuable that could not be done before, you can close millions of revenue your first week. It's never happened before in the history of software, right?
Before we move on, I do just want to stay on Anthropic and I want to discuss— they've lined up $5 to $6 billion for an employee share sale at a $350 billion valuation. Obviously, there's people queuing up out the door for this. This was following obviously OpenAI doing the same a couple of months ago. Have we ever seen liquidity at this scale? When we look at the number of millionaires minted from OpenAI, soon to be Anthropic, when we look at the NVIDIA millionaires that exist already, is anyone going to be able to buy a house in the Valley?
There's a lot of things that seem silly in AI 12 or 18 months ago, but if NVIDIA has 20,000 deca-millionaires, right? I'm— now I'm going to, now I'm going to, um, do a wag, but based on the math, I'm going to say we're going to produce 100,000 deca-millionaires out of these AI leaders. Okay. Um, and Rory's better at the math than me, but NVIDIA already has 20,000. So if that's the case, that would be great if every— like, everyone was at full employment and we were all full of companies with six-figure employees making money. The, the worry is— I don't want to spend too much— the worry is that We, we do see this concentration of wealth at the same time as everyone else gets leaner. Um, and will Jevons paradox create more employment in tech or not? I believe it will create— I, I don't believe— I believe we will need more engineers than ever, like when we talk with Michael Cannon-Brookes. I, I don't know if it will create more employment.
