Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue?

SpaceX closes the $60 billion all-stock takeover of Cursor. Your gross margin problem is my revenue opportunity for my Colossus cluster. Pessimists sound smart, optimists die rich. OpenRouter, $7 billion acquisition by the Irish Polson Brothers. It'll be like the Scale acquisition. It will be the start of something that gets bigger. I don't even think this product will exist in five years. Anthropic turns its first profit on $11.5 billion of Q2 revenue. You can't add expenses below the line fast enough to stop yourself making money. The only thing that matters will be the growth rate in the '27 and '28 projected revenue. Someone who was hired with a million-dollar package in '23 ended up making $51 million four years later. On the consumer application side, Higgsfield raised at a $5.5 billion price. And then you have Lovable raising at a $13.3 billion price. Guys, we've talked about these companies a lot. How do we think about them? Ready to go.

Boys, we are back. We have some mega news this week. SpaceX closes the $60 billion all-stock takeover of Cursor, minting thousand-x returns for the likes of Anthropic, Partovi, Neo. OpenAI's startup fund is a mega winner who invested six to eight million dollars very early, which, Rory, I thought of you when you said before about Elon Musk giving Sam billions of dollars through gritted teeth, and many others thrive, and most importantly netting huge returns. What do we have to say on this one? It's the closing of an already announced deal. Thoughts?

And you say that because it's going to be at $6 billion end of year and then you're paying 10x, or you mean it because —

I'm intrigued why Zuck didn't buy it. He's building the model capabilities with Alexandr and co. He's missing the enterprise capabilities. This would have solved that in a similar way that it solved it for xAI.

Interesting tangent. And yes, if the logic is, hey, you've got a whole bunch of compute but not an obvious business on top, the two people for whom that's true are Meta and SpaceX. And you're right, SpaceX did it and Meta did not, right? So that's, yeah, at a high level, it's a fair point. But one of the things we pointed out in the agenda is SpaceX could move a little more exp — they didn't do one of these weird acqui-hire things. They just bought it like a regular old corporation. They didn't have any antitrust — I mean, they actually filed for antitrust, they got quick clearance. They didn't have any compelling issues with that. I don't know if the seller would have had the same confidence that the seller would have the same confidence that Meta would have gotten through, right? Just given their DOJ — they just probably are going to have the DOJ more kind of crawling through what they do. So that would be one argument. It may also be, to be very direct, no one else had the stomach for the bet on the way Elon does. And I mean, yes, Meta is relevant here in terms of fitting the characteristics of lots of compute, no compute business on top, but Elon has the biggest advantage, which is the stock is trading high. They're doing what, 20 — I mean, it's $8 billion last quarter in revenues, call it $30 billion growing, round up to 50. What the hell, you know, right? It's still 40 times revenues, right? Picking up a big asset, as Jason says, at, you know, 15 times current revenues, maybe less than 10 times year-end revenues, dirt cheap for him, right? A net accretive day one in a way that probably wouldn't be as true for Meta. I haven't thought about it all that much because frankly, until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought of that. But this was, I mean, one of the things for me is if you zoom out and just reflecting back on Jason's comment on the gross margin negativity, right, that's true. That story was true when it happened and it's still true today. There are challenging margin issues, right? And when you reflect on the journey, you kind of — the negatives that you can cite along the way tend to be true. They're correct. Those were real. And it's a question of the positives. And when you look at an investment, the positives in terms of market trajectory just outweigh the negatives. I mean, it's easy to sound very kind of financially smart and say, oh, in the end, everything has to generate free cash flow. This doesn't have gross margins, so quote, in the end, it's worthless. But it's wrong because along the way, when you have a market that's exploding like coding, that's a huge market. Remember, this is the biggest market for AI. Like 70, 80% of Anthropic's trillion-dollar market cap is predicated on this, right? If you have the number two player in that space and you're growing hyper-fast, then even though, yeah, you got gross margin challenges, the buy, especially in a kind of optimistic forward-looking market, the buyer's going to look past that and say there's only one or two ways to play in this space at a meaningful level, and it was just a perfect fit. Right? In a very, frankly, in a very different capital markets, it could have been a very different story. You know, oh my god, there's no capital. Oh my god, the gross margins. Oh, no free cash flow. Maybe you have to slow down and do a very different trajectory as Cursor. But in this market, they were able to go balls out, for lack of a better word, have those tough gross margin stories, and then find a buyer who not only was willing to look through it, but actually had every incentive, every ability to solve it because he's like, your gross margin problem is my revenue opportunity for my Colossus cluster. So it just shows, yeah, the issues, the negative issues didn't go away. They just got swamped by the optimistic take. And that's why, you know, it's the old cliche we talk about, you know, pessimists sound smart, optimists die rich, right? Those guys had — Jason said it — there was probably some very tough days, but they had the guts to keep moving forward. And because the market's huge and because frankly the environment is risk-on, they've had an amazing result. Good luck to them, you know.

Agreed. And you know, I was reading, you know, Noah Smith, who's kind of a dem-center but moderate centrist blogger who's not an Elon fan, just wrote a great piece about a year ago that says only a fool denies that Elon Musk is wildly effective. He is, you know, regardless of your opinion on the merits of it, he's one of possibly the most effective person on the planet at getting [__] done when it comes to industrialization, physical AI, and AI, right? And you know, from a standing start a year ago, he built the cluster and then he bought the product to sit on top of it. And he took SpaceX from literally a year ago being a really amazing rocket and satellite connectivity story to being, as the S-1 says, at least in terms of the quote future prospects, 89% an AI story. I mean, you saw his tweet, you mentioned it a year ago, you know, I've underestimated — some version of underestimate AI time to go. He went from a standing start to owning more compute than pretty much anyone else and owning a product, the most important product to fill that compute, in less than a year, just over a year. That's just wildly effective management. Just it's world-class in getting [__] done. The other small factor, just thinking about it, we can move on, but imagine you are Michael Truell, right, and things are going pretty well. You've got a term sheet from — you're what, 24? You're a paper deca-billionaire. And Andreessen and Nvidia and Thrive want to put in money at 50, right? You're not that cash-motivated. You could take out a billion, right, or 500 million, right? Things are going okay. These are very rare deals, but even though working with Elon in a year might turn out to be terrible, right, I would much rather initially work for Elon than for Zuck personally. I would do it like — Elon is the guy I want. If I had to work for somebody, it'd be Elon. I mean, he is better than me. This guy is [__] rockets. He does everything. And Zuck's firing everybody and going crazy because he doesn't have an LLM. Not that he isn't one of the greatest entrepreneurs, but I wouldn't want to work for Zuck, but I would want to work for Elon. And that actually matters. It may be a mistake in M&A as a target, as a CEO, because we've all — when we've been founders on the other side, we've made mistakes here, right? I tell ad founders to ignore it. Ignore the brand. Ignore what you think the job is today because you have no idea in 24 months what the hell you're going to be doing. But it is incredibly emotionally important to founders to land in something they want to land in, right? And I would not want to land at Meta today. If I was Alexandr at Scale and I got $24 billion and I had a tough business, maybe. But this one, man, I'll take Elon over that one.

Do you think Amazon or Meta go, eh, we'll take Cognition instead? Is there a knock-on effect for the second player in market, which I think arguably now would be Cognition?

There's actually a quality of absolute imperative to do something. You know who has to, and I think SpaceX had to because they had all this compute and it looked like they had to fill it. Now subsequently they've also been able to rent that compute to Anthropic and Google. I don't think it's nearly as existential for different reasons to the two you named, and I'll name one for whom it is. For Amazon, you know, they're in the AWS business. I mean, they got lots of contracts with Anthropic. They basically have the compute for Claude Code. So they're basically getting the inference-side revenue for that. They don't own the model, but it's important, but not imperative. They've never done a $60 billion deal that they're starting now. Meta, that to me is more, again, unlikely. And the reason they didn't do it earlier is their core business is an ads business. It's freaking amazing. This is literally — I have a wonderful ads business. It kicks off north of $100 billion. I've chosen to do this new AI thing. We can pretend it's strategic, but it's really I just freaking really interested in it. I don't know if you have to do another $60 billion deal on top of that one. So not as imperative. I think just to put it out there, I'm going to name the company for whom this market matters is Microsoft because you remember he's now long since gone and owns a basketball team, but Steve Ballmer would jump around the stage, sweating, screaming, it's developers, developers, developers, right? And the fact that they've lost that connection with developers, that GitHub is now a trailing-edge product, is to me over the medium term pretty significant loss. I mean, operationally the numbers are fine. It's a well-run company. But if you wanted to name people who should want to own a leading state-of-the-art coding product in this brave new world, clearly the number one person is Microsoft. Now the antitrust issues would be a longer discussion, but I don't think — in other words, I don't think owning the developer is existential for AWS. I definitely don't think it's existential for Meta. It's 100% existential over the medium term for Microsoft. There was a fantastic tweet that said Satya should buy it and then make Scott the CEO of Microsoft. I thought that would be a rather ridiculous thing to replace himself, but I actually thought Scott would be a rather brilliant CEO of Microsoft.

You feel like they've got to — folks have to jump in to respond to Cursor, that everyone else —

There's another mega acquisition that happened this week. It's not quite the $10 billion that was reported, but OpenRouter, $7 billion acquisition by the Irish Polson Brothers. Rory, your brethren. Um, yeah. I mean, what an incredible journey. Alex Setlur, CEO, who I just had on the show, he founded OpenC before. It's obviously the leading LLM routing company. Raised a Series B. It was a $1.3 billion valuation just four months ago. So it's 5x that or CapitalG. It's a 12x for Menlo. And how do we think about this? It's widely reported. Now it's confirmed.

You can see intuitively how Stripe gets there from here, right? Is that, you know, when you look at their existing business, it's kind of a — they get paid a small percentage of the money flow to manage complexities in collecting cash via cards and also by ACH. And here they're going to get a small amount of the money flow to manage the complexities of picking models and running, you know, as an enterprise using a single API to run, you know, tens of maybe hundreds of different models. So kind of I can see at the conceptual level it totally makes sense. And a lot of lift recently has come from — even on their payments business has come from just their customer base being so AI-forward that every time you spend money with OpenAI or Anthropic on a credit card, they get some of that money. So I can totally see how they get there. And again, it's some version of the same thing as the Cursor comment. You can do the old intellectual, oh, what are the barriers to entry for this business? Oh, over the medium term there'll be lots of people and there's a ton of weenie router companies out there and everyone's building one. But it turns out in an early land grab when people are moving, you know, remember the meta market here is growing 10x a year. If you take Anthropic's growth rate as the big picture comment here, right? If you move early and you build a useful part of the infrastructure, right, you will probably find an acquisition at a price that doesn't make any sense on a DCF to you basis, but makes huge sense to the acquirer because OpenRouter — just like Elon will turn Cursor into cash flow far quicker than Cursor could have turned Cursor into cash flow. I'm willing to bet Stripe will turn OpenRouter into money probably quicker than OpenRouter could do on a standalone basis. So these kind of — this is what happens in a crazy market is that if things slow down, a lot of these — the acquirer would run the buy versus build and say there's no hurry, we've got five years. When things are moving as fast as they are now, you're going to see, in my view, until such time as you see the correction and the acquirer currency diminishes, you're going to see a whole bunch of people like on shopping say, screw it, I want to be in world models, I'm just going to buy the card, I don't have time. Screw it, I want to be in — you know, Stripe, screw it, I'm huge in payments, I want to be in the AI inference flow. Quickest thing I can do is spend $7 billion, some of it stock, get these guys and be rolling in a week. This is what you see. You saw it at early internet stage. You saw it back in times even before that. That would make you cry, Harry, if I even mention them, right? When things are moving really quickly in a buildout, you just see these kind of amazing acquisitions where the value to the acquirer dictates a very healthy price. And it's one of the reasons why venture works. You go right out there in the risk continuum, but if you time it right, you know, you can get these kind of returns. And you know, well done a16z. Well done, Menlo. Well done, CapitalG. It's a reminder, you know — one thing, I have a couple thoughts if you want to get into — but it's a reminder, you know, how weird revenue is in M&A because if you're bought by PE, like revenue and top and bottom line are incredibly important down to the significant digit, down to cell G38. Okay. If Workday goes private, exactly what its DCF will look like in 2032 is so important. The weirdest thing about M&A with big companies is revenue is so important to argue over multiples and the price. Like it's so important to price, but it's irrelevant because it's all about what Stripe can make out of OpenRouter, right? So it's just such a weird thing that your revenue going into big M&A actually doesn't matter at all, even though it's probably the biggest input to price. But then it's irrelevant — like Stripe, what's OpenRouter doing, $70 million, $80 million today? Stripe does not care for that money, right? And so you often see acquirers will abandon even the existing revenue to do the revenue. It's just such a weird paradigm. But I would just — two things. Rory's right, Stripe actually appears to be very good at acquisitions. It's how it accelerated into crypto and otherwise. They're good at it. The flip side you could say is maybe they should be better at building these themselves, right? That's the grouchy version. Why didn't you build it? But if you're good at M&A and this is 5% of your market cap plus cash, right, and you want it tomorrow, it makes sense. If you're good — you have to be good at M&A though, right? And then you do it. The counterpoint is I love OpenRouter. I talked about it on the show like six months ago. I'm a customer. I'm a user. It was brilliant. It was one of these pieces of software like ElevenLabs which is just instantly easier to deploy. It's just elegant. It was just a beautiful piece of software, but it's pretty niche.

In what sense, Jason? Just a genuine curiosity.

First of all, I do think that's fair because, you know, we internally agonized about this space and that was exactly what we were angsty about. And you're right, and your framing is exactly correct. Like the positive trend — let's spell out the positive trend — is as long as you have the frontier model trying to extract $100 billion in revenue from you this year and you're an enterprise, you're going to want a plan B, right? At least to keep the thing honest. So you are going to want some kind of routing. It's what you said that resonated with me, Jason, a little bit, which is remember when cloud was starting, people like, oh, I want to be multi-cloud. It's really hard to be multi-cloud here. Maybe I want to be multi-model, but maybe I only want two or three models, and therefore I don't need this kind of routing functionality. That is the risk. If your enterprise customer decides I need to flip between three models but not 10, then your value here goes down, right? I would imagine the positive spin is your value here goes up to the enterprise if you can build on top of just picking a whole bunch of normalization of all those options and try and commodify the model. So that's the kind of tension point. The more you can do that and the more you can service the people who don't care all that much, the better your business. But you're right, if JPMorgan says I want more than just Anthropic, but I'm not going to qualify 10 models, I'm just going to work with Poolside as my plan B and then offload the rest to something else, then you're right, then you have niche and you don't get that revenue.

Yeah, I'm remembering the conversations now because you are right. The great thing about the core Stripe product is all payments are equal and all — and Visa is the rails for everything. That might be the case. Duly noted. Keep going on.

Yeah. Yeah. Rippling said GLM 5.2 because I mean one of the big questions will be how much pricing pressure enterprises can put on the foundation — the closed foundational model companies and how do they put that pressure on because I think it impacts a lot. Sorry, Harry, go on. In five years' time, will this be considered a successful acquisition or not? Bets on prediction.

I think it'll be like the Scale acquisition. It will be the start of something that gets bigger. Whether this brand exists or whether even this product exists in five years — I don't even think this product will exist in five years. But I think it will be — I think there's a high chance, more than 51% chance, it builds into a 20 or 30% revenue stream for Stripe, and that's enough.

I don't know. I think that's — I think Jason's answer resonates with me, is if it works, it'll be seen as a TAM expansion play. What's fun about Stripe right now is they're doing that acquisition, which is very much a, hey, we don't play in this space, let's put a stake in the new ground. And at the same time, they're talking about a PayPal acquisition, which is very much, we own this space already, let's buy these guys, fold them into what we already have, and just make a [__] ton of money consolidating, right? And actually, I think that's a clever strategy. I mean, I think they're actually playing a very clever hand. They're doing some things that, you know, there's probably a one-in-three chance that they have a massive AI routing business in five years, but if they do, that's a big second leg. While at the same time, if they get the PayPal deal done, that's the kind of deal you have a high — to Jason's point about if you're good at M&A and good at consolidation, you probably have a high degree of visibility that you keep those revenues, that you remove the entire G&A, you get more of a two-sided network because you have consumer wallets which Stripe doesn't have, and you know you've done core consolidation acquisitions. Doing them both together, provided you can pull them off, is, yeah, super interesting in terms of building enterprise value. And they're doing it all private. Again, back to the comment, doing what looked like public-company-size M&A and pulling it off while private. I know they got the investors to take Stripe stock in the OpenRouter deal. I think some portion of it was stock, and you know, the PayPal deal was more complex and probably requires more thought. But again, being able to do what is, I think, a $40-50 billion deal and a $7 billion deal issuing paper while private is pretty impressive. Stripe's Corp Dev team need a bonus at Christmas time. They are busy this year.

They are busy this year, but isn't everybody? We mentioned margin pressure on foundation models. Anthropic turns its first profit on $11.5 billion of Q2 revenue. The business is getting better for Dario. This was also in a week where Gavin Baker said about Dario, saying he believes that they will be the final private company. Did you see this?

The other — I think the other question is, as we gear up for an IPO which could be very imminent, right, is how — what numbers does Anthropic get away with, right? So for example, you've got off-balance-sheet liabilities, right? You've got massive commits, you've got probably stock-based compensation like we've never seen in the history of mankind, right? So if you get asterisks and daggers on your numbers, they will be jaw-dropping, right? If they have to fully account for that, and some of that's non-GAAP, right, these off-balance sheets, if they have to fully account — if they're going to be hammered like a poor Wix or someone for SBC, and everyone's going to write up the horrific downside, right? But I think everyone's going to look through all the nerdy negative things you could see in the numbers. They're just going to ignore it, right? But I do think it's important that it get ignored. I think it's important for Anthropic it get ignored.

Yeah. What would it take in usage for Anthropic to hit the $200 billion in ARR plan for 2028 and then $600 billion in, you know, the next year? The simple version is how many knowledge workers are in the world, right? How many folks can take a subscription? Being generous, is it a billion human beings, right? So, you know, if Anthropic has 100% market share at 200 bucks, that's $200 billion. If Anthropic has 300% market share, that's $600 billion. I don't know, Rory's thought more — the $600 billion seems complicated, but, you know, our demand for AI is only just begun. You can see $200 billion, which is the number, right? Once you start getting to the $600 billion number, it gets really hard because no one ever looks at the big number, and I've just been doing some work on this, right? No one ever steps back and looks at the big numbers total. I mean, you said a billion knowledge workers in the world — absolute bollocks, right? There are 80 — I mean, hard-nosed comment here, US is typically 50% of the world's software budget because we're 50% of the world's high-end knowledge workers. You know, we're 25% of the world's GDP. So at a minimum, if spend tracks GDP, we're only — it's only 4x the US. But every software company is typically 2x US. Why? Because the rest of the world can't afford the same software we do because they're poorer and they have more people at lower wages and less software. That's why we have crappy internet when we go to Europe, right? So the truth is, the hard-nosed comment is this: you probably take the US knowledge worker spend and double it. There are 83 million knowledge workers in the US, right? And then roughly 86 physical labor workers. So that's what you start with, and you start cutting it down. And I literally was doing the math this weekend thinking about it. You start cutting it down real quickly, right? The truth is, you know, knowledge workers includes everyone in healthcare. I don't think we're going to — you know, we're not going to replace the nurses. It includes the teachers, right? The sweet spot — the sweet spot of the whole damn thing is there are — yeah, there's about 1.8 million people doing coding in the US, including then QA and all the other — there's around 5 million people that do software-related [__], systems admin stuff, all the rest of that, and they get paid in total, grossing up, about $600 billion a year, right? $200 billion means you're replacing a third of them. That's a lot, right? And remember we said this before, the single most important ratio — and I asked you about what you thought it was, Jason — is what's the ratio of software in a steady state? What's the ratio of salary dollars to AI dollars? Right? Because that's what's — you know, if it's 50% of salary dollars, you can easily get to $200 billion. $600 billion is hard in coding. Well, you can't get there. If it's 10%, then it's hard to get $200 billion across the whole thing. So it really boils down to in the steady state, how much revenue, how much of the — how much software — because if software is the tip of the spear in terms of max adoption, what do you think for every $100,000 you spend on an engineer or $200,000 you spend on an engineer, are you going to be spending $100K on software — $50K, sorry, on AI, $50K on AI or $200K on AI? That's the number.

Yeah, we're testing it.

For what it's worth, I actually agree with that. That's what my mental model too, and that points to a total — and let's assume it's not just dev engineers. Let's give the sysadmins, the QA guys. This will do the same thing for everybody. Same thing for everybody. You get 200 grand of wages fully loaded, including all the benefits, and 100 grand worth of AI, but we cut 30% of you. That turns out to be terrifyingly about a $200 billion plus or minus market in the US, and no one ever —

Yeah. Jason always gives me these terrifying sound bites that I go back and think about because I'm, you know, we did this survey, you know, we tend to be fact-based people. We did the survey of all our companies and we saw similar to the ramp dispersion, which is some companies all in, some companies, yeah, adopting but still, you know, dramatically less spend per head. I can't remember the average, but it was dramatically less. And you know what I didn't do, and actually now that I think about it I should do and I will do, is go back and say if you can touch a strong correlation, which you believe you should be able to, between output and spend, you can justify the spend, then you're right, then you should be saying to the laggards, you're just going to fall behind. If it goes out at 2 to 2.5 trillion, would you be a buyer?

I think they've just capitulated to it. My guess is like you — of course you want to be first, to your point, right? I think OpenAI has had to get their house together more. Executive turmoil, apparently a great last 30 days, right? But first half of the year slower than its previously junior competitor, right? They've had to do so much. Say, listen, we're going to go public second and then we're going to have a comp out there and the comp is what it is and we may not trade with the hype that SpaceX and Anthropic did and the world will not end. Like we will trade at a very precise number, we will know what we're going to go out at, and the world will not end if we trade at 1.3 trillion. I just think that they've given up on worrying about that. Um, because ultimately Rory's right, it's much better to be first. But in the long run, it doesn't matter, right? You're just going — if you don't need the capital, it just is what it is. But Jason, that's — I'm going to push a little. That is the sentence. There are no two companies on the planet that need more capital than these guys. In a world where you do need the capital, being second sucks, because I agree in general you are correct, right? It doesn't matter, you know, two companies go public plus or minus a year and a decade later no one cares, right? We've definitely seen that over the years. The thing that's challenging in this particular case is both companies still have enormous many-hundred-million, billion-dollar capital needs. In that situation, I would much prefer to be first.

Agreed.

Yes. Agreed. And look, I'm not catastrophizing here more than any. But I think the interesting thing is if you're the smaller market cap company and you have the bigger capital need, which right now OpenAI does because they have a more ambitious capital need target. Now, would you prefer to be the guy trading at one and a half trillion who only needs to raise 100 billion or the guy trading at a trillion who needs to raise 300 trillion? At some point these things become troubling. And yeah, price clears all markets. This is the best new technology market we've seen in decades, ever perhaps, and if you are the founder in that market and even now the number two, you're going to attract capital, but you just don't know the terms under which it happens. And going back to my comment, I think you will regret not being able to access the capital markets this year. Who knows.

Jason, you said about management team churn. The churn, for those that don't know, most recently was Denise Dresser, who was the CRO, who left, and Dali Rajic has replaced her. For those that don't know Dali, he's one of the most respected CROs. He was a freaking master at Wiz, and I think the best CRO or sales leader in the business, who's Chad Pet, says he's the best of the best. So, I'm feeling a little bit more confident for their Codex and enterprise division.

Jason, you said if you have not already hit your end of term or end of year goal in terms of product and you're not well into 2027, you're behind. I'm making assumptions. I don't imagine Workday quite at the cutting edge like two of your companies at 2027 already hitting those goals. And Silver Lake circles a $43 billion take-private bid for Workday. One of the biggest SaaS buyouts ever. We got two of the best SaaS minds in the business here, guys. What should we take from this? SaaS isn't dead. One of the biggest firms, one of the biggest buyouts. The stock popped 18% afterwards.

Wow. I think what you can take from this is that the 'SaaS isn't dead' thing is just too simplistic. I think what you can take is that a very financially oriented, wildly savvy buyer is willing to bet money that they can buy this at a constrained price, lever it and generate a return because the revenues are sticky enough to allow them to pay down the debt over five years and with, you know, reasonable multiple stability, sell it on and make a 20% IRR plus or minus. I mean, I ran the numbers. That's the bet, in other words. So, it's not quote dead, though. But what it is not is wildly exciting. What it says is this is the mature phase of an industry, right? When it's not about wild growth, it's not even about untempered growth. It's literally about someone saying this thing is growing at 13% year-on-year. We can probably, you know, we can buy this thing for — was it roughly five times revenues, 16 times trailing EBITDA. We'll probably leverage it, you know, two or three times, four or five times in EBITDA, but it's going to be a big equity check. And then you run the LBO model and you say, you know, you keep at 35% operating margins for five years. You use all that cash. It's roughly 10 — I think it's 10 billion a year in revenue. So, it's like three billion a year of cash. You pay down the debt and the interest. And, you know, provided you buy right, you can make 20% and almost a 2x over four or five years.

Can I ask you a question? Precise financial engineering for a four to six year hold period. Six years ago ChatGPT didn't exist. Are you able to do fine, precise financial engineering in a world where we move so fast?

But it wouldn't be in the damn base case. And Jason, you framed the base case exactly correctly. It's like it's 5.3 times 12. In other words, what this says is financial minds will pay five times revenues for system of record growing at 13%. Anything that's not a system of record, anything that's not growing as fast, price accordingly right down from here. Because you're right, there's no way you'd apply the same kind of leverage to, for example, a to-do or a task management or project management software or a website building software. Right? In other words, what this gives you is kind of — maybe I'm trying to — what this gives you is a sense of what the baseline is for best-in-class LBO takeouts. Right? If you know, if Airtable — if the Airtable Bending Spoons gave you an idea of what it is, if you just, you know, if you don't have that kind of system of record, you get 2.7. If you do have — if you're vaguely profitable and in a space where, as Jason says, you can't predict five years, you get 2.7. And what Workday says is if you've got 30% operating margins, modest growth, but you're a system of record where you really can believe in the next five years, then if you're lucky you get 5.3 times revenues. That's the big-ass thread right now. That's the aha. And, you know, contrast just one last comment. Contrast that with the game for OpenRouter where they're going to get, I think, a trailing rev plus or minus 100. You know, they're going to get 70 times trailing revenues. Which game would you prefer to play?

Agreed. I want the most closed system that can't churn because the reason system of records aren't that great is because if they're — you need your system of record, but if you're remotely open and you can produce a better agent yourself or a third party, a lot of the value will extract to the agent even if the system of record is retained, right? But Workday is so closed, they've got a leg up, right?

Jason, how open is Salesforce?