If we take the Senate and the House, be clear, it wasn't that Democrats are back. It's just that for this moment, the American public decided they hate Democrats less.
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
We've got a lot to get to today, so let's dig in. There's so much. First, I mean, we got the Anthropic IPO. We'll get to that in a second, but it's a busy time for elections. Let's hit those quick. Brazil's leftist president, Lula, just won re-election, though his right-wing opponent, Bolsonaro, who's the son of the previous Bolsonaro, is refusing to accept the results. And Serbia's longtime leader, this is a big deal, just conceded defeat to a student-led opposition movement. This was exciting. Israel is also going to the polls this week, voting whether Netanyahu gets to stay in power. It looks like he's not going to, but who knows, the other guy might not be able to form a government. And here in the US, the midterms are now just one week away. Before we get to midterms, talk about what these elections — something's coming. I don't know what it is, but it's going to be great. It feels very much a change moment. Thoughts?
You can read it either way. I don't know how much of a litmus test Brazil is because Brazil has compulsory voting. And also, while it looks like the populist or the more progressive is going to take the election, the son of someone incarcerated looks like they're inheriting what was the equivalent of the MAGA movement. So you could, I think, interpret that other ways. The most encouraging thing is what's come out of — is it Serbia?
And that is — and I've, you know, I've been talking about — I think young people are the immune system here. Like there's a variety of things plaguing the world right now, but if you look at what's going on in France, if you look at the election results in Serbia, I think what has happened is that young people are saying we're sick of old people voting themselves more power, the ability to engage in corruption, and voting themselves more money. This was a student-led electoral victory. Now, unfortunately, in America, young people don't show up to the voting polls. They get a Robinhood account and start trading crypto. I'm not sure. I hope we see an uptick in young people voting. You know, that'll remain to be seen. But loosely speaking, if you had to be reductive about it, you would say that there is a pushback on corruption that is being led by young people who are fed up with not only corruption but a lack of affordability. And also, what, for example, in France, the statistic that is just sort of, I think, rolling over the world right now in a variety of measures is the following: in France, a third of the education budget goes to paying the pensions of retired teachers that are no longer teaching. That is just not sustainable. And I think young people have kind of — now, granted, there will be opportunists and just thugs and just people who are angry who will join in and take advantage of it and are anarchists, and, you know, that's unacceptable. But the kerosene waiting for matches of different flavors here is the notion that there is a corruption scandal across the world right now, and the young people feel like, okay, enough of using my credit card so that you can keep going to Maison.
You're right. I think — but I do think young people are engaged politically much more so than you think. I think you're seeing it.
And I hope they do vote, but I think they are tired of older people sort of running the table for them. Now, it'll be interesting to see what happens in Israel and if this government — if Netanyahu loses, if the new person can form a government, we'll see. I mean, it's difficult. I mean,
Election day almost doesn't matter in Israel. It's their ability to kind of play chess, which Netanyahu has been a grandmaster at, to form coalitions.
And unfortunately, the way he stayed in office is by forming coalitions with very far-right ultra-religious groups. I've been watching that election closely. I mean, obviously, I'm more focused on this one, but that is a really important one.
Students. Yeah, that's really interesting. And we'll see where we're going. We are seeing the numbers here move in, again, the Democratic direction. Let's talk about that. Former President Barack Obama is back. He hit the campaign trail this weekend, accusing Trump of bringing chaos and cruelty and corruption to the country. Nice bunch of C's. He even channeled his inner Logan Roy, saying administration officials like Pete Hegseth are, quote, 'not serious people.' Obama then took a shot at Trump's White House makeover. Let's listen.
I don't know if you've noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations.
This guy's building a ballroom that's bigger than the White House. It's paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the south lawn, and there's gold everywhere. What's up with the gold? Everything needs more gold. He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory.
You got to miss him. I got to say he was funny. But, you know, he did this for Kamala. It didn't really work, but was sort of on a roll. I'd love you to talk a little bit. We have a bunch of other election-related items, including the more serious ones, with elected officials around the country preparing for potential federal interference in midterms. There's already cause for concern in Alaska. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit at Trump's request seeking to block certification of the Senate race. If the Republican incumbent loses, it's because of the name — that it's ridiculous. Attorney General Todd Blanche says Trump is not trying to take over a state election in any way, shape, or form, which is precisely what he's trying to do. And of course, Elon Musk is pouring even more money into the midterms. He just gave another $76 million to his PAC, bringing his total contributions to Republican groups this cycle to more than $445 million. The PAC has spent more than $12 million attacking Texas Democrat Colin Allred. And Allred is pushing back against Elon. Let's listen. 'Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our taxpayer dollars. And he wants his very own personal United States senator. He is trying to buy Texas. But on November 3rd, we're going to deliver a crystal clear message to the world's first trillionaire: Texas is not for sale.' He's been using this line all over the place. So, let's start with Obama. Thoughts on this? He's going all over the place. You know, he did this again for Kamala, was not effective.
I think 'Saddam Hussein, it's as if Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory' is sort of the line of the midterms. And what Obama gets that the rest of the Democratic Party doesn't get is that ridicule is more powerful than indignance.
Or being righteous, right?
And that is, you know, comedy is a strategy.
Like outrage as a hobby, and he's just very powerful. He doesn't come across as mean or Trump derangement syndrome. He just ridicules the guy. We don't have anyone like him.
And what he does is he creates an atmosphere where he comes in late. Very few people understand brand management like the Obamas. They are very, very prude and manicured in terms of their appearances, who they associate with, when they say, when they don't say, and they're smart to hold back until the very end. And what he does is he probably adds 10 or 15 bips to every Democrat running. And that's powerful. He's not going to save a bad candidate, but he might. He quite frankly just creates — he's another, you know, couple million gallons of water forming a wave. Now, how big, you know, again, it's the candidate more than anything, but he provides cloud cover.
And what this also means, I mean, going forward, the thing I'm most worried about is November the 4th.
Yes. You and Hillary Clinton.
I really hope the Democrats don't mistake this. This isn't a blue wave, it's a red riptide. And what it comes right down to is, if we take the Senate and the House, be clear, it wasn't that Democrats are back. It's just that for this moment, the American public decided they hate Democrats less because Democrats are not polling. And if the Democrats and Speaker Jeff don't immediately move to a series of bold proposals about affordability, restoring a progressive tax structure, taking away the anxiety that Americans feel around healthcare and security, more sanity around our foreign policy, specifically our tariff policy, we're going to find out that, yeah, they had a one-night stand with us, but they're not interested in having a relationship with us.
Right. They've got to follow up. They will. And they also have to worry. This is something Hillary Clinton brought up last week, is let's worry about what he's going to do between now and January when they have to seat this new Congress. He's going to try all manner of hijinks. He's already trying in Alaska.
He is that, but he'll continue to do so, and he'll get more and more possibly demented, because he really is. With someone who covers him closely, I was like, well, maybe this will finally shut him up. And this person was like, absolutely not. It's going to get worse, worse, and worse. The way I see it is, when I was building — when I was renovating a home, our neighbor basically found out he didn't want construction while he was there. So he came up, he hired a lawyer, and just got in the way of development, and showed up to the local review board and said we were threatening the manatee population. Anyway, just literally tried to obstruct it. But eventually, at least in Florida, you eventually get to renovate your house. And that's because the law kind of weighs in, and you can delay and obfuscate, but you can't change law, I think, so far. So, for example, 538 has Democrats at a 76% chance of winning the seat in Alaska. And that's — Trump carried Alaska by 13 points in '24. In other words, I think all this attempt to interfere in the elections — I'm not saying it's not important. I'm not saying we shouldn't be worried about it. I'm not saying we shouldn't push back on it and have lawyers at the ready. But I do think ultimately the person with the most votes — and this happened in, you know, this happened in 2020, that our democracy did hold. What is unfortunate about it, and what Sacha Baron Cohen was talking about, is — I love the term 'shared lies' — and what he said that really struck me, and what's kind of the longer-lasting thing about this, is that if you were in the bubble that those January 6th rioters were in, were they really guilty?
Yeah, because they thought they were being patriots.
If our leaders don't have a series of shared truths, it's becoming the Republican strategy — the Republican acceptance speech or the Republican post-election speech is one of two things: either I won or it was rigged, right?
And that just can't continue.
They're going to have to move on. They really are. I do think if it's a convincing enough defeat that they will turn on Trump immediately, if not sooner. They've got to get him in the rearview mirror and move on in many ways. They can't keep holding on. And by the way, you know, he's already pretty demented these days. And with those little outbursts he has, those noises he makes, I think they've got to move him way off screen as much as they can. That said, Elon Musk continues to pour money, and I suspect he'll do the same for the presidential to try to get JD Vance made president. What this money is — staggering, Scott. This is staggering amounts of money. And I know Bloomberg — Michael Bloomberg gave $80 million, but this is nothing like that. This is crazy.
It's staggering, and at the same time it isn't, because while numbers create a metric, above a certain amount the metrics begin to become very opaque and our brain can't even wrap our head around it. So, okay, first off, $440 million, a staggering amount of money. It has an impact. It has a lower impact. The ROI is going down, and I'll come back to that. But to give you a sense for that, and how — until we overturn Citizens United, our democracy is going to be whittled away one cut at a time. It just is. To give you a sense for what that means, he's a trillionaire. So, $443 million — oh my god, what a staggering amount of money. Okay, let's put it in relative terms. You're a millionaire. You're worth a million dollars. Okay. And if this group of politicians gets elected, it might get in the way of your car wash. And so you'll do anything to keep this representative out of Congress because they don't like your car wash. It's your car wash they have deemed is bad for America, and you have government contracts and you're getting tax credits in your state.
And that's why he's so demented against Allred, obviously.
You're a millionaire. This candidate you see is an existential threat to your ability to stay a millionaire. Let's just not even go to politics. Would you be willing to spend $443 on the campaign? That's what it is to him. $443 million to a trillionaire is $443 to a millionaire. So for the cost of a really good dinner, if you saw huge advantage and leverage to getting one candidate elected over the other, would you spend $443?
So the question is — and I now believe this — I think we should let our trillionaires cook. I want them to make a lot of money, but on one side, you have to have campaign finance reform. And two, I do think much more progressive taxation protects us from this type of corruption.
There's really nothing good from someone becoming a trillionaire. And people will say, well, he's smarter than us on business, granted, or most people on business, and he deploys capital in incredible ways that benefit the economy. I'm not suggesting he shouldn't be allowed to make trillions. I'm not suggesting he shouldn't be able to invest it and take the capex right off. I don't want to decrease his genius or his investment. What I'm suggesting is when he decides to take the money and recognize that gain and do things such as spend it on a boat or spend it on a political campaign, which is not tax-deductible, before he does that, it should be taxed at a minimum AMT of 40% and possibly more than that.
Yeah. Okay. I agree. I think this — this —
No, this is something you've been saying. I can't believe that the Democrats — this is something Democrats could win on. They've had enough money. They have enough money and they're now [__] with us. And I think it really is — it is coalescing people. The amount of money he's giving, you know, he's sort of become the Bond villain of our country. And I think especially with Allred, the obsession, the obsessive — you know, he doesn't even have Natalie Harp to write those for him. And just like on and on and on. There were like 20 of them in a row in one evening, late into the evening. And the reason he, of course, is going for Allred is because all his stuff is — he moved to Texas to get away from people. By the way, California helped him a lot, but they just — oh,
But they didn't like one thing he did, and so he had to leave in a big old flounce. Now with Allred in Texas, he's going to have a problem. And —
He left for taxes to get a bunch of subsidies.
I get it. But now he's very upset about Allred — I mean, a senator from Texas. Anyway, we'll see what happens. But it's an enormous amount of money for an unaccountable trillionaire to be able to say.
But even — okay, so the Democrats have vastly outraised Republicans in terms of number of people and underraised in terms of the amount of money. Why? Because there is regulatory capture among billionaires and they think, 'Oh, these guys will wash my back. They'll scratch my back.' So —
Yeah.
I'm all over them. The silver lining here, and I think this is a reason — you know, in my — you know, I have a lot of reasons why we should vote blue.
This will send a strong message that the market — I think the market is starting to gag on money. What do I mean by that? Just as if you pour too much money into any one asset class, the returns go down. $440 million just 10 years ago could have got one president elected over the other in a close race. Now it might not even get a senator in Texas elected.
So you're going to see — and this is a good thing. But the bottom line is this is the full local TV station employment act.
Right. Yeah. No question. You know, these —
Which is owned by conservatives, which is kind of funny.
But local TV stations lose money for basically 44 weeks a year, and then the eight weeks before the election they make it all back.
And election people who make these swing districts — everybody.
Anyway, good luck, Elon. I hope it turns out like it did in Wisconsin. Okay, Scott, let's go on a quick break. We come back, Anthropic takes the next step toward going public. Exciting.
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Scott, we're back. Anthropic officially filed its IPO, which everyone knew was coming. Let's go through some of the details. The company's revenue has skyrocketed, bringing in $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from just $1.2 billion a year earlier. But the company reported an $80 billion net loss in the first half of the year. This had been reported previously. Anthropic has committed more than $600 billion to future cloud computing deals. Five of the company's customers accounted for about a quarter of its revenue for the first nine months of the year. 94 pages of the filing are spent on risk factors, with the company warning investors about rogue AI models and opposition to data centers. Anthropic co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, would retain a combined 50.1% of voting power. The company hasn't yet revealed how much it plans to raise or its offering price. It's a really interesting situation. And by the way, at the very same time they're doing this, Elon is trashing data centers because, of course, he's in the data center business and he's trying to kill all the other neocloud businesses. But talk a little bit about Anthropic.
Look, it's staggering. It may be the fastest-scaling software company — it is the fastest-growing software company in history. So effectively, let's just talk a little bit about the numbers. So what it shows is, okay, revenue in 2024 was $386 million, in '25 it was $4.5 billion, so up 12x, and so far this year in the first half it's clocked 16. So call it an annual rate of 40. So it's 10x-ing in '26. So first half — so it basically 14x-ed its revenue from the first half of last year. I've been trying to sort through the numbers. They called it a net loss of $81 billion. Ignore that, because $72 billion of that loss was the accounting loss you have to take when you take a convertible bond and convert it to equity.
Yes. Explain that. They borrowed money and then they turned it to equity.
So, an incredible innovation in the debt markets is something called a convertible bond, where you pay them kind of a below-market interest rate, but you have the opportunity to convert your debt into equity if the equity goes up. And so it's a chance to kind of have the downside protection of a bond. The company gets cheap capital, which it can pay back in cheap equity if the stock goes up. It's kind of a great innovation. But when a debt converts to equity, which is kind of a good thing for everybody — shareholders get a little bit of dilution, but you take the debt off the balance sheet, you no longer owe that money, and then debtors get to participate in that sweet, sweet returns of a growth company. But when it converts, you have to take that as an accounting loss — the actual conversion from debt to equity. If it's a billion dollars in convertible debt that converts to equity, you have to recognize that billion dollars as a quote-unquote accounting loss. So the numbers I've sussed out is basically it did $25 billion and lost nine. But if it's growing four or five times at high margins, it should be able to get to profitability. Now, they've done a bunch of, like, you know, hocus-pocus to try and show that they're sort of profitable. I hate this [__] adjusted EBITDA [__]. So, for example, what Anthropic does and OpenAI doesn't, to their credit — Anthropic books the full revenue of a token sale, whereas OpenAI only takes the 20% that they recognize because the rest goes to the neoclouds and stuff like that. But this is —
It's impressive. It's impressive.
Correct.
There's just no getting around it. This company is scaling unbelievably fast. This is anecdotal evidence, but quite frankly, the permissions I get from Claude Code work have probably, in my opinion, been the greatest innovation for me in terms of a change in my life since Uber.
Okay, so let me ask you, what's the problem? What are you worried about? Like, be the —
Besides AI rogue, obviously.
Okay, first off, government regulation. If the government can't come up with some sort of regulatory policy that lets these guys understand the rules by which they're playing by, and gives the public some type of certainty for what is going on here and not going on here, the IRGC figures out a way to just hack a light signal at a busy intersection and then spins up their bots and blames it on AI. You know, the states are going to start banning AI models. People are scared of this [__] right now, and people don't trust it. 75% of Chinese trust AI, only 25% of Americans. There's an existential risk.
They hate it. It's not just not like it. They hate it. The terms are very — you know, it's really interesting to see the attitudes.
Everyone was saying that the scarcity was around chips. It's not. It's electrons. It looks like it's power. There is huge risk around the levels of capex they have to make, and if these things don't keep 10x-ing, all of a sudden — I added up Anthropic's commitments to $400 billion, people are saying it's six to 800, I don't know how they got to that math, but regardless, unless they keep 10x-ing, which they are doing right now, someone's going to go, uh-oh, the math doesn't work.
Right, and can't pay the bills. Yeah.
And then competitive risk. Nvidia is talking about taking their GPUs and putting them directly on a client phone, which quite frankly might leapfrog LLMs. And then you have Meta with its own LLM that is free, that is number one in the app store, that has a direct relationship with half a billion businesses and three billion consumers. There are threats everywhere. But the reason there are threats everywhere is this is a blue whale, and there are orcas everywhere thinking, how do we take this thing down? But the blue whale is 10x-ing right now.
It's the Google essentially is how I think of it. Like, is it the Google versus anything else, and where will it go? And I think the issues are what'll happen to the OpenAI IPO post this depends on what it does. At the same time, if it doesn't have as impressive of a bottom line here, they're going to have a real problem. And then what do the big companies do? What does a Microsoft do? What do the rest of them do? Because there is a precariousness that I think Elon was pointing out, which is all these neocloud businesses are going to go belly. He called them guppy-guppy level extension or something — I forget, something with guppies. And he's talking his own book because he sells compute himself. That's how he's making money. He's not making money in people using it as much as it is renting out his space. And so it's important to him for these things to happen. It all sort of feels a little Jenga-like, some of this, where it's like —
A lot of circular deals, but —
But consumers are using it. Consumers are using Claude.
Well, let's talk about those numbers. It's — I hate this, but it's adjusted measure. It made $1.6 billion in operating income in a half. It's a 10% margin. A year earlier, the margin was negative 159. Let's see what happens when they actually start accounting for it in a rational, mature way. But I still think growth kind of cures all problems. Computing infrastructure costs were $9 billion in the first half. That's already more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025. But still, you can't get around the fact that Anthropic's revenue growth and efficiency has been incredibly impressive. Get this. Get this stat. Revenue per employee is about $6.6 million. That's up from $1.4 million a year earlier. So the efficiency here is remarkable. By the way, that's greater revenue per employee than every Mag 7 member except Nvidia. And it'll probably surpass Nvidia's revenue per employee.
So well-run. This is a well-run company.
They don't have that. I mean, this is the nightmare. This is the nightmare for politicians and for citizens and for college grads, and the dream for shareholders. They don't employ that many people.
And their revenue is up 1400%. Their employee count wasn't up 1400%. They didn't 15x their employee base.
And this is what is so — I just can't get over.
This is how every board meeting in a growth company works. The CEO comes in and says, 'We're going to grow revenues 12% next year, 14% next year.' That's like a modest growth company, which means I need permission to hire another 8% employees or increase my employee base 8 or 10%, which will increase earnings 15 to 20% next year. And we go right at it. How about it, brother? Meta two years ago or six earnings calls ago said, 'Oh, we increased revenue by 23%, and we did it with 20% fewer employees.' That should have sent shut — that literally all of a sudden. And no one likes to talk about this. If you use the term AI in a board meeting, they expect the next sentence to be, 'I'm going to do more with less.' And when I say more, I mean more revenues and less employees.
And this is what Anthropic is showing.
It'll be okay. Last question because we got to move on to the other side. What is the valuation in November when it goes public?
Well, it'll be looking at — I'm trying to think what their '27 projected numbers will be if their first half — if they're at a run rate of 40.
I think it goes out at two trillion because I'm just — my Greek glands are going here. If it's doing 40 this year and they think they cannot 10x it but 5x, that's 200 billion on two trillion, that's 10x forward 12 months rate. I mean, that looks cheap compared to SpaceX and some of these other guys.
And let me say for everyone, it's coming after the election. The Democrats just got a lot of new donors because this is not a MAGA group of people. Let's just say it'll be interesting to see where they deploy their political capital going forward. And speaking of how you deploy your capital, Elon Musk is finally admitting that SpaceX restricted Ukraine's access to Starlink. You think this is what Scott and I said he did? He's claiming Ukraine violated Starlink's terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes to kill people, which Ukraine disputes. But Elon —
Also said Star Shield is a different system controlled by the US government, and what they decide to do is up to them. This again, a bunch of lying. Ukraine says Starlink and Star Shield are now operating at normal speeds after more than a week of disruptions that impacted military operations and led to the deaths of people in Ukraine. That incident again reminded people how much power this guy has and whether they'll do anything at all about keeping him in check. I will also note Musk also reportedly invested about $1 billion in David Ellison's Skydance. They need the money, but guess what, Scott? I'm leaving. Sorry, I just had to say that because I know you like it. Um, though they're trying to get me to stay again. They're trying to get me to stay.
