trillion

Donald Trump Jr. has a lot more in common with his dad than just a name, sharing the president’s penchant for shady dealings and for kleptocratic Russians. Sometimes the two proclivities go together. That was the case in May, we learned this week from ProPublica, when Don Jr. married his second wife during a three-day Bahamian bacchanal bankrolled partly with hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Putin-allied oligarch the Trump scion met only recently.

I had to wonder — recalling Don Jr.’s response in 2016 on learning Russia helpfully wanted to dump dirt on Hillary Clinton — whether he replied in kind when his new Russian friend, Umar Kremlev, offered the wedding grift, er, gift: “If it’s what you say I love it.”

My second thought was that Don Jr. is just like his dad in wanting to spend other people’s money, even as the Trump family has accrued billions since President Trump has been back in office. (Cue the continued silence from the sleuths of Hunter Biden’s laptop.)

Just days before ProPublica’s exposé, at last week’s midterm Republican convention in Dallas, the elder Trump proffered a gift of $5,000 to every one of the roughly 270 million adult Americans. But the eponymous “Trump dividend” would come only if Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities after the November midterm elections.

The tab? More than $1 trillion, roughly $1.3 trillion. How generous Trump is with the U.S. Treasury, despite the news just last month that rattled bond markets and raised interest rates: The United States’ gross debt has exceeded $40 trillion. As Trump told CNBC in 2016: “I love debt. I love playing with it.” We can’t say he didn’t warn us. Even before his proposed 5K giveaway, Trump was on track to break his first-term record for adding to the unsustainable U.S. debt ($8.4 trillion).

Trump’s unprecedented offer of a post-election payout provoked predictable cries of “bribery” from Democrats and other critics. But legality aside, even the appearance of a bribe isn’t what bothers me most about the proposal.

For one thing, it won’t happen. No one will be receiving a $5,000 Trump dividend, just like no one received the DOGE dividend or $2,000 tariff refund he previously promised. Even if Republicans pull off a miracle and retain control of Congress, those in power show no zeal for his budget-buster, not after their complicity in adding trillions to the debt since last year with tax cuts, war costs and this, that and the other Trump pet project. And Congress indeed would have to act, under the Constitution, despite suggestions from the obsequious Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, that Trump could act alone. (But “I’m not ready to discuss it at present,” Bessent told a House committee on Tuesday.)

No, what bothers me most about Trump’s idea — what outrages me — is the damnable fiscal irresponsibility of it.

Trump has turned much of historical Republican orthodoxy on its head, including on immigration, trade and policy toward Russia. But his utter disregard for annual deficits — a record $2 trillion for this fiscal year that ends Sept. 30 — and his shameful profligacy with taxpayers’ money is something Americans haven’t seen in their lifetimes, in either party. Worse, Trump implies otherwise, that he is fiscally responsible, and he does it with lies that are so easily refuted, so often contradicted by his own words, that it’s a marvel that even such a chronic prevaricator as himself can utter them.

This week Trump is still claiming that the $5,000 dividend will be paid for because “we’re taking in trillions and trillions of dollars” in revenue from his inflationary tariffs on more than half of the goods imported into the country. The actual number isn’t even close to that, and he should know it: The data that nonpartisan analysts are crunching are from the government he supposedly runs.

In 2026, tariff revenue through August was just under $200 billion, but more than half of that already has been spent on refunds to big corporations including Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot, in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against some of Trump’s tariffs. And as if Trump’s dividend proposal weren’t mendacious enough, in making it he seems to have forgotten his claim in his State of the Union address in February that he would use the tsunami of tariff revenue to abolish the federal income tax.

And one last thing: Even if each adult American got $5,000, subtract from that the nearly $2,000 that each household has paid, on average, because of higher tariffs since Trump took office, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

In this one dumb idea, in sum, the giveaway manifests just about all that is wrong with Trump as president: The lying, of course. Fiscal recklessness. The trashing of commendable Republican doctrines. The Trump bubble of sycophantic yay-sayers. And, in turn, the seat-of-his-pants policy idiocy, from war-making to White House demolishing.

The lack of any actual policy deliberation behind Trump’s $5,000 shocker was clear in his lackeys’ flailing and contradictory reactions — not just Bessent’s specious claim of presidential authority, but also Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s inane insistence the administration could somehow “earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out” and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett’s comment, contrary to Bessent’s, that the White House is indeed looking to Congress for funds.

The good news? Americans get it. Recent polls have the percentage approving of Trump’s handling of the economy as low as 28%. Significant majorities say they are worse off since he became president again.

Such numbers portend an election result that isn’t likely to be changed by a promise of $5,000. Especially from a serial promise-breaker.

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Crypto traders are assigning Anthropic an implied valuation more than $1 trillion (€866bn) above its last funding-round price, before public investors have even seen its accounts.

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The company behind Claude has filed its IPO paperwork confidentially and chosen Nasdaq for its initial public offering.

What remains is the public release of its S-1 filing, the official registration package that a US company submits to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Until it arrives, the only live price on Anthropic comes from a corner of the crypto market where pre-IPO speculation runs rampant, and it currently sits far above anything the company has ever agreed with an investor.

The last agreed valuation was $965 billion (€836bn), set when a $65 billion (€56bn) Series H round closed at the end of May, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia.

That was already an extraordinary figure for a company founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, and it followed a valuation of $61.5 billion (€53.3bn) barely a year earlier, representing a nearly sixteenfold increase in roughly 12 months.

Revenue has moved almost as fast.

Anthropic’s annualised revenue run rate passed $65 billion (€56bn) by the end of July, driven by enterprise adoption of Claude.

The losses are also enormous, reportedly reaching close to $42 billion (€36.4bn) in 2025, reflecting the cost of training frontier models. Amazon has committed to investing as much as $33 billion (€28.6bn) in the company, while Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion (€86.6bn) on AWS technologies over the coming decade.

Given these figures, investors are already aiming considerably higher than the valuation in the last round.

Reports have put the target IPO valuation at $2 trillion (€1.73tn), with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley leading an offering expected to raise more than $60 billion (€52bn).

The market that is already trading

Perpetual futures contracts tracking Anthropic’s pre-IPO valuation are currently trading on Hyperliquid, the largest decentralised derivatives venue, where the implied market capitalisation reached an all-time high of roughly $2.36 trillion (€2.05tn) and sits near $2.15 trillion (€1.86tn) at the time of writing.

That is about 2.2 times the Series H valuation.

Heng Yu Lee, partner at market maker DWF Labs, which is active in these instruments, rejects the suggestion that leverage rather than conviction is driving the premium.

“Whether it’s leveraged or not, everyone trading the pre-IPO market is genuine demand at the price that’s reflected,” he told Euronews, adding that “the premium is pricing in public information that’s available, such as expected revenue numbers and expected market demand for the stock.”

These contracts will also be the first instruments to react when the filing lands, trading around the clock while equity markets are shut.

“At a moment like the S-1 dropping, you typically see volume spike and prices fluctuate heavily as the market digests the information,” Lee explained.

However, the market remains small relative to what it is valuing.

“Currently, the market isn’t super deep, with just $6M in 24-hour volume and $31M in open interest on Hyperliquid,” Lee said, adding that liquidity should improve as the listing approaches, given that more investors are likely to pile in.

Lee is also candid about how much weight the number deserves.

“As of now, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the absolute pricing as we have yet to have a public S-1,” he stated while clarifying that “the direction of how the prices move typically still accurately reflects the shifting sentiment towards the company as things develop.”

A crowded year for AI listings

Once Anthropic files publicly, it will cement 2026 as the year of AI IPOs.

It started with chipmaker Cerebras Systems, which designs wafer-scale processors pitched as an alternative to Nvidia’s. The firm listed on Nasdaq in May after two false starts, raising $5.55 billion (€4.76bn) at $185 a share, above its revised price range.

The stock opened 89% higher and closed its first day near $311, valuing the company at roughly $67 billion (€58bn) compared with the $23 billion (€20bn) it had been worth three months earlier.

Investor appetite for a credible Nvidia challenger proved fierce, though the enthusiasm cooled quickly after a disappointing first earnings report. Cerebras is currently trading at a valuation of around $43.7 billion (€37.8bn).

Then came SpaceX, which listed in June, raising more than $85 billion (€73.6bn) at a valuation that briefly touched $2.8 trillion (€2.4tn) before falling back to around $1.95 trillion (€1.69tn).

OpenAI was also slated to hold an IPO this year and had already filed confidentially, but has now stepped back entirely. The company has a private valuation of $852 billion (€738bn), set during a $122 billion (€105bn) round in March.

CEO Sam Altman told Fortune on Saturday that listing this year would be “ill-advised”, ruling out 2026 and declining to commit to 2027. He said the company had “a lot of stuff to do” on safety and alignment and that being private made that easier.

Altman’s comments arrived the same day that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”, arguing that AI companies should deliberately slow the rate at which they improve their most capable models.

Amodei proposed three steps: independent evaluators with employee-level access to frontier systems, coordination on safety standards among labs in democratic countries, and international agreements on the most dangerous categories of use.

Anthropic has already committed unilaterally to the first, and the endorsements came quickly, with Sam Altman saying he agreed on the need to pace the frontier and Elon Musk replying simply: “Dario is right”.

However, US President Donald Trump did not.

In his first public response to the three CEOs, Trump, speaking in Ireland on Sunday, dismissed the argument.

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said, describing some warnings as things “that won’t happen”.

Trump has since reiterated that argument in several social media posts.

Likewise, China’s foreign ministry called the warnings “fearmongering”.

Markets registered the exchange, with shares in SoftBank, Kioxia and SK Hynix falling sharply on Monday. Shares in the Japanese and South Korean companies fell more than 6% and 4.3%, respectively.

This leaves Anthropic in an awkward position as it approaches what could be the largest listing ever attempted in public markets.

The company is asking public investors to fund frontier AI development while its founder argues publicly that such development should proceed more slowly.

That is not necessarily a contradiction, since pacing is not stopping, and Anthropic has always argued that safety-focused labs should be at the frontier rather than ceding it.

However, it is a story the S-1 filing will have to tell convincingly, and the risk factors section will be read unusually closely.