Billionaire investor Philippe Laffont: There will be a $10 trillion company in the future

I always wake up at 3 a.m. and I know we literally about something. Yeah, but now it's not Bitcoin anymore. I don't know what to think about Bitcoin anymore. The one thing I was wondering with Bitcoin is there was a time when there were very few IPOs. Part of it is I think the public markets are a little bit broken with so many index funds and stuff. Everybody thinks the same, thus nobody really wants new IPOs. I wonder if Bitcoin was a little bit sort of the off ramp for everybody that wants to have something a little bit more speculative. Yeah. Now that we have this big IPOs on one side, and then we have stablecoin on the other, and stablecoin involves the word stable. So if you really want to just put your money offshore, put your money in a new system, you can go through stablecoins. Frankly, stablecoins more or less are already paying interest. I don't think they really are. But there are schemes where you get these rewards and stuff like that. So if you want just the stablecoin, you can. There's fabulous IPOs coming out, there's space, there's going to be some AI. And I just wonder like, well, where is Bitcoin now? And the purpose of Bitcoin and a little bit, what you need to believe is almost this maximalist view about Bitcoin. Like when I speak to people about Bitcoin, it's a bit like a cult. You're either in or you're not. So that's just my new thoughts on Bitcoin. I'm a little bit more worried and I would rather bet on a space going to quadruple over the next 20 years or these intelligence models going to be like, if you think today the market cap of the world is 70 trillion of the US, 60 to 70, let's say maybe it's 130, 140 in 10 years. It could be, let's say 200 plus. Is there going to be a $10 trillion company in 10 to 15 years? I find that debate and trying to figure out which of those companies might be a $10 trillion company, sort of easier for me than figuring out where's Bitcoin going to be in ten years.

I think there is. I think yes, I think like today, NVIDIA is what, five, four and a half, five, let's say four. Keep it simple. And the market cap of the US is 60. And let's say the market cap of the world is 120. So a large company can represent 6 or 7% of the US and maybe three or 4% of the world. So in the future, could a company be worth 5% of the world? Now that would be 10 trillion. In essence, if the world some day in ten years or so gets to 200 trillion, and which one could it be? It could be one of the existing ones, could be one of the new ones, which is sort of fun because the Magnificent Seven is sort of changing in front of our eyes, right? It's really no longer quite the same. First, I think it's more like Mag 11. Mag 12. If you think that the Mag is every company over a trillion. So you've got 11 or 12, I think Berkshire, Eli Lilly, there's a couple non-tech ones. You've got TSM, Broadcom, you've got a few others. I think in the future there's a good chance that OpenAI and Anthropic could be there. SpaceX could be there. Maybe there'll be another space asset. Who knows. Maybe Blue Origin or something like that could turn out to be a second very large company in space. So I find what's fun for me and what keeps me going is to imagine sort of this index of the future and who's going to be in that index of the future. And if you can do that and sort of stomach the daily volatility like today, then you should be able to do well.

I have found, like, you know, in thinking about Anthropic in particular, and OpenAI is doing equally well. Sometimes Anthropic does a little bit better. Maybe like now I'm convinced that at some point OpenAI will do a bit better than it will be Anthropic. To me, the two key questions on the models is, one, there's this view that somehow models are going to be free, that you have these open source and this intelligence is going to be free. I don't think so. I think people are going to want to sort of do business with the best models in the world. And also you could have the best model that's expensive, but you could have the Anthropic model from three years ago that's like super cheap. So Anthropic could both be cheap and not with respect to these models. All the stuff around agents and the ability to have thousands of people working for you. That sounds like one of the bigger ideas, at least in my investment career, this concept that you sort of go to bed at night, there's a thousand people working for you and you've got all this work done and ready for you the next day. It's a new way of working. I'm having a hard time. I'm still like scribbling on a piece of paper, my notes and stuff like that. But I see people, even in our own office, the way they come up with new ideas and the productivity they get from AI, it's really there and it's still moving quickly.

I think through Anthropic, through OpenAI. And I also think, and it's a bit of a shame, like, why are these companies not public earlier? And why isn't it that retail and small investors can't get access to them earlier? And I...