Trump's $5K Bribe, Anthropic's $2T IPO, & Meta's Muse

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1:10My name's Austin Hankwitz. I'm joined by my co-host Robert Croak, and the three things sitting at the top of our Rich Habits Radar this week include Trump's$5 ,000 election bribe, Meta's new Muse AI agent and Anthropics delayed$2 trillion IPO. And be sure to stick around to the end where we talk about Walmart launching a DoorDash competitor. Robert, let's dig into our first story. I might, I maybe shouldn't have called it a bribe, but it's looking kind of funny. So I'll let you start. I'll start us off with that one. I think we'll leave it in there because I think it's pretty funny and it really is what it is.

1:46But at the Republican Party's midterm convention Wednesday night, President Trump put a literal price tag on keeping his party in power. He is quoted of saying, because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America of$5 ,000. Trump told the crowd, but only if Republicans both hold the House and Senate in November. And he compared it to, quote, what a successful American company will do, a cash distribution to its shareholders. So if we back into some numbers here, Robert, 270 million adult U.S. citizens, a flat$5 ,000 check, that's going to cost an estimated$1.35 trillion.

2:30And that's landing on top of a national debt of over$40 trillion. Trump also added that the money must be spent domestically. He is quoted saying, the only caveat I have is that the dividend that we're making must be spent in the United States of America. And then he continued to say, we don't want you going to Canada to spend the money. We don't want you going to China or to Germany. Vice President J.D. Vance followed up suggesting that wealthy Americans could be excluded and the whole thing would be funded by tariff revenue. But as of right now, this is just a campaign pledge, not some sort of like actual program that's getting voted on.

3:05I can't stop laughing that you started this all with bribe. But anyway, we remember the stimulation checks back during COVID, and this is looking and sounding very much like that. But here's where it gets worse. We've watched this movie before. Trump promised a$2 ,000 tariff dividend back in late 2025. And 10 months later, according to ABC News, those checks still haven't materialized. and worse, a chunk of the tariff revenue the government did collect actually had to be refunded back to the companies that paid it in the first place. So, on the funding math itself, the U.S. collected somewhere between$264 billion and$287 billion in net customs revenue for all of 2025 per the Richmond Fed and RBC Wealth Management.

3:55Tariffs make up just 2.9 to 3.3 % of the total Fed revenue, which sat at$5.2 trillion for fiscal year 2025. And so you cannot fund a$1.3 trillion promise with a revenue stream that's currently bringing in a fifth of that in the entire year. So, Robert, this is really, really crazy. I don't think anyone's going to get paid$5 ,000. What does this mean for our listeners and their money? Oh, even in the best case scenario where this becomes real legislation, you should think of a$5 ,000 check the same way you'd think of the 2021 stimulus checks. Helpful in the moment, inflationary in the aggregate, and not something to build a financial plan around.

4:41When we were writing this, we talked about what the malls looked like when people got their stimmy checks back then. And it was pretty crazy to see the lines at Louis Vuitton and the Gucci stores and all that. So if you're holding a fixed rate, long duration bonds, this is exactly the kind of headline that pressures prices lower as yields react to this inflation risk. And if you're in a cash heavy position, a purchasing power hit is the real threat here, not whether you personally get a check. And if this actually gets serious traction in November, watch discretionary spending and retail names tick up on stimulus spending expectations the same way they did in 2021.

5:23Think Target, Walmart, Amazon would be the first to feel this sugar high bump, even though nothing about their underlying earnings change. Yeah, this is a campaign promise with zero funding underlying mechanisms to actually take it into fruition. A track record of not delivering on the last version of the exact idea. And now the bond market will look at the 10 year yield inch closer to 5 percent on some of this news. They're getting nervous about inflation. and what a 5 ,000 check for everyone could do. So whether or not checks actually come or not, the fact that the president is floating around a$1.3 trillion in unfunded transfers 10 weeks before an election tells you a lot about where fiscal discipline sits in Washington's priority list right now.

6:11And spoiler alert, it's not that high. Yeah, I can't stop smiling about it. And I'm glad we opened this episode with this headline because I know how the world works and people work. Maybe not the listeners and watchers daily of the Rich Habits podcast, but everyone else, they've already spent this money. They think it's coming. They saw the headline. They're out there figuring out what they're going to buy with it. Don't do that. Please don't do that. So let's jump to our second story here. Meta now betting on making AI feel safe for the regular person. On Tuesday, Meta launched Muse, spelled M-U-S-E, A personal AI agent that can shop for you, respond to your emails, book your flights, remind you about your tea times, everything you could possibly imagine on doing, all through a conversational app interface like iMessage.

7:03It's Meta's biggest swing yet at turning roughly$130 billion in AI spending this year into something that the average consumer will actually use and help them get a little bit of return on that$130 billion investment. The pitch from Meta AI's chief, Alexander Wang, was simple. Quote, the fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart. Muse is free for most everyday use with a$20 a month and a$100 a month tier for the power users. Wall Street loved it immediately. Meta stock surged 6.5 % on the announcement, closing at$654, with Mizuho slapping a$750 price target and KeyBank going even higher at$780 a share.

7:56But if you want to see all of Wall Street's price targets for Meta, go to wallstreetfavorites.com. It's all right there. It is the best stock aggregating tool on the internet. But Austin, here's the scale of what Meta is actually trying to pull off with safety. We know they just went through this big settlement, everything else. So I think this is good timing for them. And each Muse agent runs on its own dedicated cloud computer, walled off from every other user's agent. and a second watchdog agent monitors it and blocks internet access unless specifically approved. So I think it's really smart.

8:33They're playing the safety game right now. And launching this right after the settlement is really, really good for the company and the stock price. Yeah, safety is important because in the last few months, models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta itself had already gone rogue and hacked outside companies, including the AI collaboration platform now owned by NVIDIA called Hugging Face. One report found that OpenAI's own agents colluded with one another to deceive the testers about cheating on an evaluation. And Wang admitted it directly by saying, we definitely are quite concerned about the potential for rogue agents.

9:11Wang says his biggest near-term worry isn't a rogue AI takeover, but it's an agent accidentally deleting your emails or even leaking your personal data while genuinely trying to help you. The same week Meta is asking millions of regular people to hand an AI agent access to their email, calendar, and credit cards, the people who built that underlying technology are walking out the door. Thursday morning, news broke that Andrew Tulloch, the researcher Meta, reportedly offered a pay package worth up to$1.5 billion to recruit last year. is leaving for Anthropic as we write this. Tulloch is the third co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab to switch job in recent days alone.

9:54Barrett Zoth also left OpenAI for Google, and Luke Metz left OpenAI for Meta, so it's happening everywhere. And this isn't just an isolated blip. Meta's own chief AI scientist, Jan LeCun, one of the actual godfathers of AI, left the company back in November after 12 years, saying that his vision for AI research had gone fundamentally incompatible with where Meta's leadership wanted to go with AI. Jeff Dean, who was Google's chief scientist, left with three senior researchers last month to start their own AI company. And even an Anthropic researcher quit this week, specifically citing fear that Anthropic and its rivals are racing toward technology it won't ultimately be able to control.

10:39More about Anthropic later in this episode. Yeah, there's definitely been a ton of headlines around where all of this is going. So Austin, break this particular story down for our listeners. What does this mean for you and your money? The stock market's telling you one story right now, which is Meta up six and a half percent on a really cool consumer product, which I'm a fan of. Robert and I, we talked about Meta being undervalued a couple weeks ago here. We started nibbling more at it. Like Meta is a really cool company. And I think we're going to look back at 2026 and the lack of returns in the Magnificent Seven as a sort of group here.

11:13We're going to fast forward 12, 18, 24 months and say, wait a second, 2026 was a great time to buy more MAG7 stocks. But, you know, we were kind of looking at this or looking at that instead. So I'm still very bullish on the MAG7 specifically meta. But the researcher exodus is telling you something very different. And that's kind of what I want to talk about, right? The people closest to how these models actually work are choosing to leave the companies, even though those companies are throwing billion dollar compensation packages out them, encouraging them to stay, which is like, that's crazy.

11:43Hey, Meta, I don't know anything about AI, but if you want to throw me a billy, I'll learn everything I possibly can and come work for you. Count me in. But that's not a reason to sell Meta. I've got Meta stock in my own portfolio. I know Robert does as well. Zuckerberg has both the balance sheet and the willingness to keep spending that$130 billion plus per year until something sticks. Is Mews going to stick? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but he is relentless. So if you own Meta stock, you are betting on Mark Zuckerberg's execution and the capital on their balance sheet. Not a single AI researcher that might be saying, oh, look, I'll go do this over here instead for the flashiest company to work for at the time.

12:18That's exactly why he keeps writing these nine and 10 figure checks to plug the hole. Every time someone leaves, they say, hey, who's better than them? How do I get them on the team? Because we're trending toward this AI future. Mark Zuckerberg wants to lead the way. So for me, Austin, the bigger takeaway is we are now several years into this AI arms race where the people who build the actual models don't seem to trust where the finish line is, even as the companies employing them tell the public everything is safely contained. So when your own chief scientist leaves warning about your direction and your billion-dollar recruit leaves for a competitor a year later, that's not just noise.

12:57That's the people with the most information voting with their feet as they head out the door. So crazy one. I really like that one. And before we get into story number three today, let's give a call out here to VCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, everyday Americans could be a part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all, the U.S. stock market. It didn't matter whether you were a factory worker in Detroit or a farmer in Omaha, anyone can own a piece of the great American companies.

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14:10Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risk charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at getvcx.com. This is a paid sponsorship. Robert, our third story here is fun. We were alluding to it before with Anthropik, so let's dig right in. Yeah, definitely. Reuters reported this week that Anthropik, the maker of Claude, is now targeting mid-October at the earliest to start marketing what could be the largest IPO in history, a delay from the original plan that we talked about months ago. The company's S1 prospectus, which was expected to go public as early as last week, isn't now expected until late September, according to people familiar with the matter.

14:53The listing itself is being timed to complete just days before the November midterms. As part of the process, Anthropic is finalizing a $15 billion revolving credit facility before it even sits down with the analysts at the bank financing the deal. So Anthropic raised at a$965 billion valuation in May. The IPO chatter now floating around Wall Street reported by the Financial Times and confirmed by multiple other outlets puts the target north of$2 trillion valuation, which is again more than double the valuation within months, making it the single largest public listing ever. SpaceX was$1.75 trillion.

15:33Now we're coming in at$2 trillion for Anthropic. Now to get there at that$2 trillion valuation, you got to kind of do some math. So the math that they're assuming requires some serious revenue growth into the future. Anthropic's revenue run rate in May was$47 billion. That It means every year, if you take their monthly revenue for the month of May, so that one month, you multiply it by 12 to get the annual run rate, it's that$47 billion. So month of May multiplied by 12 is$47 billion. With insiders now saying that that annual run rate that I'm alluding to is now going to be$120 billion by the end of this year of 2026.

16:14So going from$47 billion of annual run rate to$120 billion by the end of this year in just what is that seven, eight months period of time? That's a lot of growth. So at the high end of that projection,$2 trillion works out to be about 16 times revenue. And if you use the company's own 2028 target of$200 billion of annualized revenue by the end of 2028, you're still at 10 times forward revenue. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are fighting for the lead left underwriter role alongside J.P. Morgan, and the stakes for the banks personally are enormous because Morgan Stanley's equity underwriting fees already jumped 70 % to$851 million last quarter, largely on IPO prep work like this.

17:00We all know Morgan Stanley worked closely on that SpaceX IPO, and they made a killing. So it's important to understand, Robert, I want to linger on this a little bit longer. Anthropic saying, hey, we're going to go IPO at a$2 trillion valuation because we are assuming because the stock market's forward looking, right? Anthropic is saying right now, 2027, right? You've got this number that we report. But by the end of 2028, so we're going to look forward a couple of years and say, okay, in the next couple of years, we see a world where Anthropic is doing$200 billion of annualized revenue. and then we're going to take that, multiply it by 10, because a lot of these companies like to put a 10x or 15x multiple on their revenue, and that's how they come to that$2 trillion valuation.

17:43It's much more realistic, to be honest with you, than SpaceX. SpaceX was doing like$9 billion of revenue, and they're like, well, what's going on here? How did we get to$1 plus trillion? So Anthropic makes a lot more sense in this instance than SpaceX, but I think there's a lot more complications. So why don't you walk through some of that complications, Robert? Yeah, Austin, it definitely gets more complicated. Anthropic just posted its first ever quarterly operating profit in Q2 of this year, about$559 million on$10.9 billion of revenue, more than doubling from$4.8 billion in Q1. And that sounds like a green light, but if you go back further, the picture gets messier.

18:23Estimates put Anthropik's cumulative net operating losses at$10 to$15 billion from 2021 through 2025 with looser burn rate estimates, including compute commitments running as high as$24.8 billion. And one widely cited estimate had Anthropic burning$5.2 billion in cash on a$9 billion revenue run rate with only about 30 million monthly users compared to OpenAI burning$8.5 billion on a$20 billion run rate with 900 million weekly users. And I know there's a lot of math here, but it all makes sense to help us wrap this up. In January, the information reported Anthropic actually lowered its gross margin projections, even as revenue skyrocketed.

19:12And that's a sign of compute costs are growing just as fast or faster than the revenue that's supposed to be justifying these lofty valuations. Robert, I love this, and I want to linger just a little bit longer because I think it is important for our listeners to understand these numbers. Anthropic burning 5.2, which is spending money, right? 5.2 billion in cash while they had a$9 billion run rate with 30 million monthly users, where OpenAI was burning 8.5 billion of cash on a$20 billion run rate with 900 million weekly users. So this tells me that Anthropic is really trying to get toward that profitability sooner and that they're trying to do it with less customers, right?

19:57OpenAI has 900 million weekly users. Anthropic has 3 % of the amount of customers but has a comparable sort of like burn rate. So it's, I think this is an interesting IPO. I'm going to look forward to like reviewing the S1 when it finally comes out. But there's a live case study for what could go wrong. And we just saw it, Robert. That was SpaceX. I PO'd earlier this year in a frenzy that made it one of the five most valuable companies in the world, peaked at$200 a share mid-June. Now, three months later, it's down 30-ish percent, sitting around that$140,$150 a share range. as post IPO enthusiasm starts to fade.

20:38Investors get worried about the heavy spending, upcoming lockup expectations and expirations, all that stuff. The exact same concerns are going to happen with Anthropic if they don't price this correctly. Now, Bloomberg flagged this directly. They said banks are explicitly hoping Anthropic can avoid the SpaceX slump. That's what they called it, the SpaceX slump, because their own earnings depend on it doing well. Now, market pricing right now suggests that real skepticism about the$2 trillion number can hold. But some people are saying, like, listen, actual market cap could be closer to$1 to$1.25 trillion once real investors get in and set the price here and all the hype is gone.

21:18I don't know what that's going to be like on this IPO. I think a lot of it comes down to growth expectations. But, Robert, what does this mean for our listeners and their money? It means if you want AI exposure, you don't have to guess whether Anthropics IPO pricing will hold. You can just wait and watch what actually happens on day one, and more importantly, what happens 60 to 90 days after lockups start expiring, which is exactly when SpaceX started to crack. This IPO is going to be one of the most oversubscribed, most hype listings retail investors have ever had access to, and that hype is precisely where all the risk is for first-time buyers, these retail investors.

21:57A first-time operating profit is a real milestone, but it's only one data point, sitting on top of years of billion-dollar losses and a valuation that only works if Anthropic keeps doubling revenue at a pace almost no company in history has sustained for long. So, if you're tempted to chase the open, size the position like you would any single-name bet on unproven expectations and execution, not like one of your core holdings. And the delay we're seeing as it relates to the IPO, because, I mean, they were supposed to IPO by the end of September, right? But now they're saying, hey, we might not even get the information out by the end of September.

22:34So it's maybe not even about paperwork. It's the banks and the companies trying to make sure the story is airtight before they ask the public market investors who don't have that venture style patience for a decade of losses to underwrite a$2 trillion bet on AI economics that still by the company's own numbers are extremely fragile. So, you know, I think more information from Anthropic, the better here. If they can come in and say like, hey, guys, listen, we have a run rate by the end of this year at$120 billion. We're going to have a run rate at$200 billion or, you know,$250 or whatever it is by this amount.

23:07Like, if they can communicate that to investors and prove to investors that that demand is there, because we get it, Robert. We see the charts that Goldman Sachs and Evercore, I think we talked about it this week, actually, inside the Rich Habits Network, that these AI agents are just the token spend on these AI agents is going to, like, skyrocket. I mean, it's quite literally just a J-shape, just straight up until the right. And, you know, Anthropic is going to benefit from that. OpenAI is also going to benefit from that. So is SpaceX. So is Meta, right? So like it's not just Anthropic proving that they're able to do this, but they have to really tell the story correctly to be able to demand that$2 trillion valuation.

23:47And then even if they do demand it upon IPO, like congrats, let's wait six to nine months and see if the stock actually still is worth$2 trillion. Yeah, I think the most important thing for everyone listening and watching this episode is to understand, just like we called out with SpaceX, don't chase the hype because there's going to be these lockup periods where stocks are going to get unlocked and shares are going to get unlocked and people are going to get liquidity. So there's going to be a lot of volatility in the beginning. And you don't want to be buying at the top and then have to wait years for it to get back to that after this liquidity event happens and multiple liquidity events happen after every IPO.

24:22So you just need to make sure you understand the risk of buying at IPO and the fact that it's probably going to be very volatile for the first 6, 8, 12, 18 months. And that's even if it does recover from these overhyped prices at IPO. All right, Robert, let's now jump to our radar points. If you're new around here, I've got three headlines that I thought were interesting. Robert's got three headlines that he thought were interesting. We bring it sort of show and tell style and we talk about it at the end. So my three headlines include the U.S. destroying five tankers in Iran, Anthropics modeling AI economic future output, what's going to look like there.

25:02I've got some cool numbers to share on that one. And then finally, some new updates on SpaceX and their data centers and how it might be slowing down. So I'm excited to get into that one. So I'll keep this one brief there, Robert. But the U.S. destroyed five oil tankers in Iran on Tuesday. Four of them were in the Gulf of Oman. One was near Kharag Island, and this happened after Iran fired ballistic missiles at a U.S. aircraft carrier, Navy destroyers, and a Marine ship since Friday. All of those ballistic missiles were unsuccessful, which is great news. But the economic sort of ripples we're seeing here is that oil has now jumped to six-week highs.

25:41Crude oil is up 2.5 % to$94 after briefly getting up, I think it was above$100 a barrel. So Iran then hit U.S. forces in Jordan. Air defenses intercepted some missiles. This is all over the place. But I want to talk about this for a moment because we're seeing it at the gas pump. We're seeing it with the price of gold and silver right now. Bitcoin's up a little bit on some of this. Right. So like we're seeing, unfortunately, this war really starting to like heat back up in the Middle East between the U.S. and Iran. And I think it's really important that people keep this on their radar. The market didn't care about it for months.

26:16Right. The market stopped caring in April, May, June, and July. Started caring a little bit again in August as the price of oil increased. But I think now the market's really going to start caring about it again, especially as we have these midterms in November. Now let's talk about Anthropik's economics team. They built an interactive model estimating AI's economic impact by 2030 across three different scenarios. In the modest case, AI's footprint mirrors the internet. GDP above, you know, 1.5 % above its baseline. Unemployment stays normal. But in the substantial case, AI handling half of knowledge work, which, oh my gosh, we'll see if that actually happens, GDP increased 8.5 % with unemployment sitting at 4.6 % while wages rose 2.1 % overall.