Proudly South African đżđŚ Partner Braavos Investment Advisers: Passion and mindset are the scarcest assets.
Joined December 2012
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Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
David Friedberg says every dollar Nvidia spends making chips turns into $18 of Anthropic revenue, with SpaceX making an 83% margin in between
âI basically said start with NVIDIA, how much does NVIDIA spend to make the chips? And then how much do they sell the chips for? So for every dollar of COGS, every dollar that NVIDIA spends, that turns into $4 of revenue for NVIDIA, 75% margin."
"And then that gets sold to SpaceX, and then SpaceX turns around, and theyâre making, you know, an 83% margin on that chip spend, because theyâre kind of looking at a five-year depreciation. So they spent $10 billion on Colossus one, five year life, $2 billion a year depreciation. And so thatâs kind of the cost per year, but then theyâre making $1.25 billion a month on Colossus."
"And then Anthropic is showing in this S-1 pretty remarkably to Sacksâs point that theyâre making about 85% incremental gross margin on every incremental dollar coming in. Itâs obviously a baseline of compute spend, but 85% is kind of the incremental gross margin. So at the end of the day, a dollar that NVIDIA spends turns into $18 that Anthropic is making selling to customers.â
Chamath admits he underestimated Anthropicâs cash, so it only needs to raise $80 to $120 billion, and he sees the IPO pricing around $1.5 trillion
âFirst of all, let me just say, the CFO of Ant, Krishna Rao, has done an unbelievable job. The fact that he entering June already had $125 billion is unbelievable."
"And thereâs a chart I didnât include, but their total net burn to get there has been like $9 billion or $10 billion. Itâs just infinitesimally low relative to the market cap. So I thought that they had a lot less cash than this."
"So when I said they need to raise between $200 to $250 and they need to price closer to a trillion, I was assuming they had 30, 40, 50 billion on the balance sheet. I was wrong."
"So these guys need to raise between, I would say, $80 to $120 billion to get to that quarter trillion. And I think in order to do that the price is probably now going to come in between 1.3 on the low end to 1.7 on the high end. So call 1.5 the midpoint.â
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Bill Ackman says Elon Musk might have to borrow a trillion dollars to open gigawatts of data centers, keeping rates persistently high, and that neoclouds are like levered real estate developers sensitive to the cost of capital
âSo, I think it is sustainable because, you know, intelligence is again an enormously valuable asset. And I think the demand therefore for the compute that enables intelligence, I think, is going to be sustained."
"And, you know, the companies that are, you know, the hyperscalers that are building out a lot of this infrastructure have the financial resources, the creditworthiness in order to access the capital."
"I worry more about the pure play neocloud companies that are a bit like highly levered real estate developers playing a theme. I think theyâre much more at risk. Theyâre much more sensitive to the cost of capital."
"But you have, I mean, SpaceX, Elon on the earnings call gave some projections for how many gigawatts of data centers he was going to open. If he meets his objective, he might have to borrow a trillion dollars of capital."
"So, you have companies competing at sovereign levels for debt. And the result is, you know, this massive, you know, more and more supply of debt. So, I donât see a world in which, you know, thereâs a dramatic, you know, thereâs a lot of demand for capital and a finite supply. So, I think that makes rates persistently high.â
Elon Musk says SpaceX is using its rocket-engine casting shop to make turbine blades and vanes, the parts that run 12 to 18 months behind the rest of the turbine, so it can bring power online 12 to 18 months faster than anyone else
âSo weâre casting the blades and vanes for the turbines. So SpaceX already has a very advanced castings capability that was developed for rocket engines."
"So we have, I think, actually the most advanced casting capability on Earth, because the demands for castings for rocket engines exceed the demands for anything else you could possibly imagine."
"So, taking that incredible team that has, I think, objectively the most advanced casting technology in the world and saying, hey, can you guys also make some blades and vanes for terrestrial turbines is much easier than what they have done in the past."
"And when we talk to the turbine suppliers, they tell us that the blades and vanes are 12 to 18 months behind the rest of the turbine. Meaning they can deliver everything except the blades and vanes 12 to 18 months before they can deliver the blades and vanes."
"So casting is this really difficult bottleneck. And if anything, it seems to be getting worse."
"So that means that we can bring power online 12 to 18 months faster than anyone else."
"Thatâs the kind of advantage thatâs difficult to replicate. Unless someone else is building an advanced casting shop, they will be unable to compete with SpaceX in this regard.â
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Warren Buffett's successor in waiting bought a quiet $10 million position in Lubrizol in January 2011, then told Buffett to buy the company. By March the deal was public and the man had resigned.
Charlie Munger was asked whether he felt betrayed. His answer never used the word.
He said he does not like any feeling of being victimized. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.
Now look at what that sentence actually does. It is not a denial of what happened. It is a refusal to take on the identity that comes with it.
A victim has a story to maintain. A survivor has a next decision to make.
So his method was mechanical. Notice the thought. Discard it before it settles. Return to work. And borrow Kipling for the frame, treating triumph and disaster as the same two impostors.
The audit committee found that Sokol had misled Berkshire. That fact stands. Munger's contribution was deciding how much of his life it was going to occupy.
Which turned out to be very little.
A man who needs $300,000 extra a year as a director is not independent, he said. The one thing you can guarantee is he will try and stay a director.
Read that again. The risk is not that he lies. It is that he behaves.
A director who needs the fee does not ask the question that ends his seat. He does not push for the audit that delays the merger. He votes with the room.
Munger went further once, on mutual funds. If mutual fund directors are independent, he said, then I am the lead character in the Bolshoi Ballet.
The same logic applies well outside boardrooms. Any advisor whose fee depends on the answer is not an advisor. He is a vendor with a nice title.
Ask who pays the person giving you the verdict.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Itâs almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone whoâs working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But whatâs happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago youâre likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
Iâve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains werenât wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly werenât either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. Itâs a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didnât work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Over the last week I built a bottoms up SpaceX financial model through the end of 2028
The numbers that came out are insane
There are wide error bars given how quickly things are changing but I wanted to distill something complicated into something that can at least be debated
* This is not investment advice!!!
** Sequoia is a major SpaceX shareholder
*** Past performance is not indicative of future results
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Why SpaceX is now getting into the turbine business and other things.
đš:NowIllustrated
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Palmer Luckey tells Joe Rogan an African grey parrot's tiny brain could change how we think about AI
Joe Rogan: Are you familiar with Alex the African grey parrot? African greys are probably the smartest bird, right up there with crows and ravens. They can talk, they can reason.
Palmer Luckey: Alex was a uniquely smart one. African greys are usually not kept in captivity because they're a handful, and they're a handful because they're so intelligent. They need intellectual stimulation, and most people don't have the time. They get depressed and self-harm.
Palmer: Alex had a vocabulary and understood grammar. I think he's the only animal who asked an existential question, right before he died: "What's happening and where am I going?"
Palmer: And he has a tiny bird brain. People who've lost huge chunks of their brain seem to get by. Parrots like Alex suggest you can do a lot with very little brain if it's oriented correctly.
Trainer: What's different? What number is grey?
Alex: Four.
Trainer: Very good. Good boy.
Palmer: That's intelligence on par with a human toddler, with far less brain tissue. Building a thinking system from scratch with AI will help us understand how other systems think. There's never been an economic motive to dig into how the brain fundamentally works. Google's never funded it to the tune of tens of billions. Meta's never funded it to the tune of hundreds of billions.
Nobody paid to understand the brain until there was money in building a copy of it.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Elon Musk now literally holds the off switch on Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO.
Anthropic's filing shows it has agreed to pay Elon's AI company up to $120.5 billion for computing power. And starting early next year, either side can walk away with 90 days' notice.
The deal is with SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit that used to be xAI, and it rents Anthropic the Nvidia chips that run Claude.
In May, the price was $1.25 billion a month for one data center in Memphis. Reuters reported the confidential draft of this filing put the total at $84.5 billion. The public version filed today says $120.5 billion.
Once all the capacity arrives in December, the bill jumps: Anthropic expects to pay Musk about $3.1 billion every month.
Anthropic reportedly brought in $16.8 billion last quarter, which works out to about $5.6 billion a month. So more than HALF of what Anthropic earns today is about to go to one supplier.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
The lock-in on those contracts ends in January and March 2027. After that, either side can cancel with 90 days' notice. Fortune reported in July that the clause gives SpaceX a way to take its chips back if Grok suddenly needs more.
Grok competes directly with Claude.
And in February, Elon publicly called Anthropic's AI evil.
So the company selling itself to the public as the safe AI lab is about to run a huge share of its product on hardware owned by its loudest critic. That critic also owns a direct competitor, and he can start the 90-day clock in early 2027.
The filing does warn that some of Anthropic's compute suppliers build their own AI models, and that warning reads very differently once the supplier is Elon.
And Elon needs this deal just as badly: SpaceX's CFO has promised $100 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. At full speed, Anthropic's rent comes to about $9.3 billion a quarter. That's more than the roughly $7.6 billion SpaceX's entire AI business brought in last quarter.
So 2 of the biggest IPOs in history are now holding each other up, and both of them have a 90-day exit.
Anthropic has a real argument here. Computing power is the scarcest thing in AI right now, and Amazon's cloud capacity for 2027 is reportedly largely sold out. The filing even admits Anthropic badly underestimated how much compute it needed in the past. Grabbing every chip on the market is the rational move, and the same clause lets Anthropic leave if cheaper capacity shows up.
But public buyers deserve 2 things before the listing: Anthropic should publish how much of Claude runs on SpaceX hardware and what happens to its customers if that notice ever arrives. And it should get the 90-day exit removed for the full length of the contract, the same way its other big compute bills are locked in.
Until then, anyone buying ANT at $2 trillion has to answer one question for themselves:
Who do they trust to keep Claude running in 2027, Anthropic or Elon Musk?
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
If I can offer any advice at all, it's to stay away from companies that are run by people with questionable character.
"You can't make a good deal with a bad person" - Warren Buffett
youtube.com/shorts/XFBBkMlMFâŚ
Dear Albie. You expertise would be greatly appreciated by us Labat Shareholders. Retail investors vs Directors. Help us out please
@albie_cilliers
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Brad Gerstner (creator of Trump Accounts) was back on CNBC today shilling SpaceX and the AI bubble, even though he's sold all of his AI stocks that aren't locked up.
35% of Brad's $SPCX shares unlock this weekend.
You literally can't make this sh!t up...
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Elon Musk says there's no AI demand issue and explains why SpaceX rents its compute on short-term contracts: AI compute is worth more per watt every year, renewals are coming in at higher prices, and the market is a âcheese shopâ with no chips left
âOur belief is that the value of compute per watt will increase over time, not decrease. And the reason for that, I think it should be obvious to people really, is that as you improve the AI software, as the models get better and better, theyâre able to, you get more useful intelligence per watt. And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt. And thatâs why you see things like even old computers like H100s renting for more than they rented when they were new.â
âAnd I think thatâs likely to continue. I think weâre going to face a shortage of superintelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time. So, I think the smart move is to do short-term contracts and to essentially place the bet on useful intelligence per watt increasing rapidly, which obviously is done, so thatâs whatâs happened so far.â
âAnd also if you look at, say, how are our short-term contracts renewing? Are they renewing at higher dollars per watt or lower? And we see them renewing at higher dollars per watt, not lower dollars per watt. We are also frankly hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler and by dozens of smaller companies to rent more of our compute. So we could rent out our compute several times over if we said yes to everyone. Thatâs just the situation here.â
âThatâs why I posted that sort of video meme of the Monty Python cheese shop sketch where the guy goes into a cheese shop to get some cheese and they actually have no cheese. And so he goes like, what about this kind of cheese? What about that kind of cheese? And they really just donât have any cheese.â
âSo weâve actually tried to offload some of our inference compute to other cloud providers so that we can use more compute for training. And we get the cheese shop sketch. You know, theyâll say, like, well, weâll ask them about what about some, you know, GB300s? Nope, donât have any of those. What about, you know, some GB200s? Nope, donât have any of those. What about some TPUs? Nope. What about some Trainiums? Nope. What about some, okay, how about some H100s? And like, well, we might have some overseas somewhere and then theyâll check and come back and say, nope, we donât have that either. So itâs like ridiculous.â
âYeah. So I donât think weâre going to have a demand issue here. And like, itâs not impossible. Iâm not saying this will happen. Itâs not impossible that we will have a six-month payback period for compute next year.â
Elon Musk says Starlink connectivity revenue has âa clear path to several hundred billion dollars,â and promises a separate presentation on the plan
âYeah, I think we probably should do a longer presentation on the game plan for Starlink connectivity and why we think it will ultimately be a business that generates several hundred billion dollars in revenue a year."
"Because you are missing some of the pieces that we know about internally. I can say we do see a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue."
"But I think we should probably describe that in more detail in a forum thatâs not limited to a few minutes at an earnings call.â
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Howard Marks on Bloomberg:
Oaktree cochair Howard Marks is breaking ranks with the billionaire bear chorus. While Ray Dalio and Michael Burry warn the AI trade is nearing its burst point, Marks told Bloomberg on October 18 that he does not see a classic bubble right now. His test is psychological. A real bubble needs investors who are blind to risk, and that blindness is nowhere to be found while Wall Street argues about bubbles every day. "If enough people are cautiously questioning whether there is a bubble in a certain area, then there is every reason to believe that even if it is a bubble, the market will behave very restrained."
Marks is not waving away the warning signs. He grants high valuations, speculative funding and heavy debt around the AI buildout. But he says investor enthusiasm has not reached a consensus extreme, and he points to the Nasdaq 100 pulling back at least 10 percent this year as evidence this is not the unrestrained run that preceded past busts. It is the loudest contrarian voice in a market full of bears, and it reframes the question: not whether a bubble exists, but how far a widely feared one can still run.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Pricing in venture is wilder than ever.
$100M pre-seed is now normal.
Bessemer just raised $1.75BN for âearlyâ and $4BN for growth.
So can you even do seed today without $1BN?
- Is capital truly one of the last remaining moats?
- Do all small seed funds and mid-sized firms just fade into irrelevance?
- Does entry price matter anymore when there are $TRN companiesâŚ
- Is this real or a bubble that is about to burst
I sat down with @spdholakia to discuss this and have added my notes from the discussion below.
1. This Is a Supercycle Like Never Before
Sameer has spent 31 years in software and has felt magic only a handful of times. A trillion-dollar supercycle followed every one of those moments, and he notes that it does not happen very often.
What is different and what is similar to prior cycles @altcap @infoarbitrage
2. Capital Is a Moat Today
Markets pick winners and the choice becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it did when developers settled on SendGrid and Twilio. In legal AI, big law firms name just two major providers. Capital lets leaders scale at an extraordinary pace and build a brand, which draws talent and customers in a reinforcing flywheel.
Do you agree with this @venkyganesan @dafrankel
3. Who Wins and Who Loses in the Future of Venture Capital?
As industries professionalize, firms must be either a giant global platform that consolidates or an extreme specialist, such as an early-stage AI investor in San Francisco. Sameer counts Bessemer as a big global platform. Firms caught in between face a hard world to make money.
Is it go big or go home @rodriscoll @rabois @chetanp
4. The Rationale for Why Anthropic Would Compete With the Hyperscalers and Why We Invested
As in the cloud era, AI would be massively capital intensive, so it would consolidate to a handful of players with hundreds of apps on top. Microsoft had partnered with OpenAI and Google was building Gemini, while AWS had an undistinctive internal model and had just invested heavily in Anthropic.
5. Why Price Does Not Matter in a World of AI and the Metric That Truly Determines Value
Bessemer invested in Abridge at $5M of ARR for a $700M to $800M valuation, in Anthropic at roughly 150 times current ARR, and led Legora's $1.8B round at $20M of ARR. Sameer judges these deals on what the company can become in the next twelve months.
How has your relationship to price changed in a world of AI @mignano @mmurph
6. Why the Rise of Open Models Does Not Denigrate the Market for Closed Models
In a market this large, predicting the mix between closed and open tokens with any precision is irrelevant. Consumers, enterprises and governments will all want different flavors of intelligence. Bessemer has invested in both Anthropic and Fireworks to hold exposure to closed and open tokens.
Love to hear how you think about this @lqiao @bernhardsson
7. Why It Is a Permanent Structural Shift That Companies Will Stay Private for Longer, but Why It Will Open in 2028
With more dollars and more firms in private venture, companies will stay private longer, and most of the run-up in this boom will happen in private markets. Sameer still expects an unlock in IPOs later next year and in 2028.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @bgurley and how you see it evolving in 24 months?
(links in comments)
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
đ°ď¸ @elonmusk wants 10 gigawatts of compute by the end of 2027. @JensenHuang says Nvidia now counts @SpaceX alongside its cloud provider customers, and the two companies' engineers are designing a server for space:
"In the two parts of our chart, Elon used to be under enterprise. That's the way we reported the numbers. Now he's part of our CSPs... They're massive.
He's using our technology for his own AI in training models and such, deploying models, of course... And the demand for GrokBot, the consumption for GrokBot is really skyrocketing. And then, of course, he rents it. And so the combination of these three things, he's fairly unique in doing that...
He loves the intersection between computing and the physical build-outs... And nobody knows more about energy than he does.
And one particular new market that we're going to go explore together is putting data centers out in space. So our two engineering teams are working super closely together to create a new type of server, a new type of architecture that might be super good... in space and on Earth."
â @JensenHuang, CEO of @nvidia on @BG2Pod with @altcap
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
$NVDA
JENSEN ON IF AI REVENUES ARE ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY CAPEX:
"Compute spend is only going higher. Nvidia has many different partners we work with. Honestly, we are putting too much emphasis with one or two companies. They will be great, but so will many others."
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
$IONQ Today in the mist of a volatile market that has seen ever quantum tech company along other companies see a drop in their stock price, IonQ raised $2 billion. We believe the main reason is to build its next major quantum computer, the Superion 10K, faster than most people expect. And I intend to share a detailed report about this tonight.
IonQ has said it aims to show a version of that machine that corrects its own errors in a lab in 2027, and to sell it commercially in 2028. We believe it can hit the early end of both: a lab demonstration around mid Q2, 2027, and first machines in customers' hands in Q4 2027.
The new money lets IonQ build several things at once without slowing down.
Here are 7 things give us confidence:
1IonQ builds its own chips, and builds them fast. Since buying the SkyWater chip factory on July 31, 2026, IonQ has cut the time to design and produce a new quantum chip from about nine months to two. It completed six new chip designs in the first half of 2026 and now produces 12 times more wafers than its previous outside supplier could.
2DARPA reviewed data the public has not seen, and chose IonQ. Throughout a two-stage review, IonQ shared test results from its prototype hardware with the Pentagon's research agency; those results have not been published. On October 7, 2026, DARPA advanced IonQ to its final stage of testing, one of only four companies selected from 11, under an agreement worth up to $300 million. IonQ raised $2 billion seven days later.
3Customers are committing before the machine ships. Four buyers have publicly committed to IonQ's current Superion 256 computer ahead of its first deliveries in 2027: the University of Cambridge, NVIDIA's quantum research center, Korea's SDT and Florida International University.
4IonQ's leaders have put the 10K in 2027. On September 8, 2026, CEO Niccolo de Masi spoke of a 10,000-qubit machine able to correct its own errors in 2027, and IonQ's president of quantum computing set 2027 for that milestone in IonQ's lab.
5The core science already works on real hardware. In August 2026, IonQ showed on one of its existing machines that error-corrected qubits performed at least as well as uncorrected ones, the break-even point every fault-tolerant design must pass. In September, its error-fixing software kept up in real time with a simulated 408-qubit workload running on a single laptop chip. In 2025, it set a world record of 99.99% accuracy for operations between two qubits.
6The same sophisticated investor came back, at a premium. Heights Capital Management, an affiliate of Susquehanna, invested $2 billion in October 2025, and the warrants it received then, at $155 a share, remain far from profitable. It still invested another $2 billion today, paying $40 a share, 15% above Tuesday's closing price.
7Last year's capital built this machine's foundation. About $1 billion of IonQ's cash went into buying SkyWater, the factory that puts the control circuitry directly onto the chip. IonQ says that step is what takes its computers from 256 qubits to 10,000.
This report I intend to issue will dive deeper into these seven reasons and others: the deal terms, the balance sheet, the hardware evidence, the competition and the risks.
Throughout, like all reports, we label what is fact, what is inference and what is our argument.
Weâre looking forward to hearing more details from @IonQ_Inc as soon as possible. We recognize all investors, including myself and the team who helps prepare our reports, want a much clearer understanding to many questions. Nevertheless, we believe 10,000 is moving ahead of schedule, the tech integration checks out and will be shared in the report ⌠until tonight.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Thought I understood $IONQ. Then I started putting the pieces together, and it blew my mind.
Andre Crawford-Brunt retweeted
Airbnb is dead. Well itâs not dead but itâs going to be dying soon.
The Bear case for Airbnb.
Iâve been bullish on Airbnb as a company for many years. But my outlook on the business changed this week.
Let me tell you why.
In 2012 I purchased my first Airbnb property. Over the years that one property has turned into a portfolio of high-end Airbnbâs that generates almost $1M a month in rental income.
Using ai agents for the first time this week has completely changed my outlook on the company.
Airbnb is facing an existential threat that most of the market is completely missing.
With Airbnb pushing its mandatory host-side commission to 15.5%, the middleman tax has never been higher.
Enter AI agents. (Hark, Dot, Muse, Grok Bot, etc)
Right now, booking a vacation rental requires navigating a siloed app and paying heavy platform tolls.
But your AI agent won't care about Airbnb's brand wall. When you know the property you want to book and you ask it âwhatâs the cheapest way to book the propertyâ it will query property management system APIs directly, find the exact same home, and execute a direct booking that saves everyone 15%.
Airbnb's entire model relies on holding supply captive behind a closed interface.
When AI agents can autonomously search, verify reviews, negotiate terms, and book direct with property operators, that walled garden turns into a leaking pipe.
The middleman tax's days are numbered.
Iâm predicting that Airbnbâs growth rate will slow down significantly in the next 24 to 36 months. And within 5 years they will be seeing negative growth.
The same can be said for most other online marketplaces that donât have unique inventory that can only be booked directly on their platform and nowhere else.