Eric Schmidt’s idea of a top programmer goes to bed at 7 PM
He owns about 1% of the Claude maker, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The stake goes back to a personal investment of tens of millions of dollars that Schmidt made in the AI startup’s Series A round in 2021. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is set for one of the biggest personal paydays from Anthropic’s upcoming IPO.
Investors have been discussing a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion for Anthropic ahead of its share sale. At 1%, Schmidt’s holding would be worth somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion. Dario and Daniela Amodei had left OpenAI with a small group of researchers and raised $124 million in a Series A round in May 2021. Secondary market data puts the post-money valuation of that round at about $623 million. In late 2022, the search giant reportedly paid around $300 million for roughly 10% of Anthropic, which valued the company at about $3 billion, nearly five times the Series A price. Schmidt, who ran Google from 2001 to 2011 and stayed on as Alphabet’s executive chairman until 2018, had placed his bet about a year and a half before his old company. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda Research put $500 million into Anthropic for a stake of about 8%. After FTX collapsed, its bankruptcy estate sold the entire holding in 2024 for roughly $1.3 billion to repay creditors.
Bloomberg says it is unclear whether he has sold any part of his stake since that first cheque. The timing is what makes the number stand out. There is one open question, though. Anthropic was only a few months old when Schmidt came in. Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn led the round, with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Schmidt joining him. Google arrived much later. Not every early backer was as lucky.