Josh Brown
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Prof G Markets · Josh Brown: If This Is A Bubble, It’s Pathetic
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What Does Josh Brown Think Is Netflix's Biggest Problem?
Josh Brown says Netflix's biggest problem is a comparison the company cannot do much about. Wall Street is obsessed with time spent, and YouTube has lapped Netflix at twice the hours. He doubts a lot of that YouTube time is chosen, because the next video autoplays, but it is still the number under the microscope.
He calls Netflix the stock he has been the most wrong about this year. He bought at 100, down from 140, bought more in the 80s and again in the 60s, sold half in the 70s just before the company reported, and says the shares are now 63, a slow bleed. The business is hugely profitable, about $3 billion a quarter, and still expanding outside the United States. The movies and the typic
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Who Benefits If the AI Neoclouds Fail?
Josh Brown says a shakeout among neoclouds is good for the companies that already own compute. If the smaller clouds that bought capacity with debt cannot raise more of it, the demand does not vanish. Amazon Web Services grew 28% in the April quarter and 37% in the July quarter, and the last report showed $496 billion of AWS backlog, up from $200 billion three quarters earlier. Four or five neoclouds folding would add to that backlog.
The same logic, he says, favors SpaceX, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. He asks whether the stock market cares more about Nebius and CoreWeave or about Microsoft and Alphabet, and he says neoclouds that cannot raise money at less than 15% are not bad news f
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Why Does Josh Brown Think Anthropic Timed Its IPO Well?
Josh Brown says Anthropic nailed the timing of its IPO. Asked whether the company comes out at $2 trillion or gets cut to $1.5 trillion, he says a cut to $1.5 trillion still reaches $2 trillion, because enthusiasm will be peaking as the shares go public. This is not a case of staying private until the heat is gone.
Bankers are learning how to run IPOs of $100 billion to $1 trillion in real time. Cerebras was a rough try at staggered windows when shareholders can sell, SpaceX did that better afterward, and Anthropic can use what they just learned. He says the company could raise $100 billion today with its eyes closed, including a Series G in the private market, and that it does not have to
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What Is the Bear Case Against Anthropic?
Scott Galloway says the bear case against Anthropic is that large companies will put a budget on AI use, and that frontier models have no real switching costs.
About 18 months ago, he says, Fortune 500 leaders told employees to go do some AI and bought it like older software, a fee per person per month. Token use then got out of hand, including jobs left running for 48 hours over a weekend. Someone from Uber said in March that the company had already blown through its 2026 token budget in the first quarter. The response he expects is not a ban. Departments get a set amount, because the company is running a business rather than an experiment. He calls that rationalizing token use, not ration
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How Much Has Anthropic Agreed to Spend on Compute?
Ed Elson says Anthropic has already signed up to spend $800 billion, and those dollars are not on the income statement yet. He reads more than $160 billion in a compute agreement with Broadcom, $120 billion with SpaceX, and $110 billion with Amazon. The sellers are companies Anthropic has named as competitors.
Josh Brown asks what else they would do. Getting caught without enough compute is worse than overcommitting, because the work then goes to Alphabet. Ed Elson says the choices look right given that bind. The filing says Anthropic will build its own computing infrastructure, requiring what it calls substantial capital expenditures that will change the cash flow profile of the business.
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Does Anthropic Have a Moat?
Josh Brown does not think Anthropic has a moat like SpaceX, Nvidia, or Apple. Scott Galloway had argued there is a non-zero probability that Anthropic is the most valuable company in the world within 36 to 48 months. Josh Brown will not rule that out, and he does not feel sure enough to agree.
SpaceX is his model for a company that can go public worth a trillion or two, because the rockets, the cost of getting payloads up, and Starlink are not an obvious thing for another firm to copy. Rocket Lab is public and tiny beside that. He puts Nvidia and Apple in the same unassailable category. Anthropic might still build that kind of moat. He also says OpenAI could go public in the first quarter,
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How Fast Is Anthropic's Revenue Growing?
Josh Brown says the revenue growth is what stood out in Anthropic's filing, even though leaks and comments from private investors had already pointed the same way. Revenue in the first six months of this year was up 1,300% from the first six months of last year, from $1.2 billion to $16.3 billion.
He calls that a lot of revenue for a three-year-old business that began as a public benefit corporation. The company is on pace, he says, to do something north of $30 billion in its third year. Customer concentration is real, and the annual recurring revenue figure can be nitpicked, including whether it is one strong day extrapolated forward. He still treats the sales number as worth reflecting on
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When Does a Bull Market Hit Its Yearly High?
Josh Brown says the high of the year in a bull market lands in December or January almost all the time. When the S&P is up double digits through the midpoint of the year, there is like an 89% chance the high of the year takes place in December. The record covers 100 years, so he will not call the pattern science.
October turned volatile, matching the usual seasonal pattern, and the selling stayed selective. Semis fell 29 percent. Some big-name industrials fell 30 percent. The financials got killed over the past month. The Fed meeting is over, and a hike had to happen. Bond yields are backing off. Oil is not quite backing off, but it is not racing higher. Another Fed meeting comes next, then
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Will Anthropic Create Thousands of Multimillionaires?
Josh Brown says Anthropic is going to create thousands of multimillionaire households. Regular people followed a dream, met a recruiter, took the job, believed in the work, stayed, and accumulated stock options. Not everybody working at Anthropic is on a third Silicon Valley run with stock options coming out of their ears and $10 million houses. People who never had investments are going to have $50 million overnight. The path can still happen in America and will never happen in Europe, where laws almost stand against it.
Size advantage, national champions, and dominance should not be read as wealth that reaches only people who are already rich and keep getting richer. The national champion
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Why Does Josh Brown Say the AI Bubble Is Pathetic?
Josh Brown says that if this is a bubble, it is the most pathetic one he has ever seen, and an anti-bubble. Ed Elson had cited Ken Griffin and Ray Dalio, who both said last week that markets are in a bubble. Josh Brown's reply is that the market prices in skepticism about growth every day. He allows one bubble claim only: today's tech profits may not last. He will not call the valuations a bubble.
Tech earnings growth this quarter is estimated at 65.6% year over year. Without semiconductors and semiconductor equipment, that falls to 24.9%. Western Digital reported $4.64 against $4.11 expected, and Oracle reported $1.92 against $1.74, while the group is still not making highs together. Since
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What Did Josh Brown Make of the Anthropic S-1?
Josh Brown wanted to hate the Anthropic S-1, but after reading it he recognized the numbers and stopped short of a full reversal. As far as he can tell, Anthropic posted positive adjusted operating income while scaling at an unprecedented rate.
Most companies growing 13 times burn cash at an accelerating rate. The rare combination is growth at that pace with adjusted operating income that is essentially positive and a move toward profitability on an adjusted basis. Adjusted operating income excludes stock-based compensation, an exclusion he hates. Anthropic prices cheaper than Palantir and roughly in line with Nvidia while growing much faster than both.
Existential threats sit everywhere.
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Why Is Anthropic's $80.7 Billion Loss the Wrong Number?
Josh Brown says Anthropic's $80.7 billion headline loss is the wrong figure to fixate on. It comes from how Anthropic must report the financing of expenses, and it includes a $9 billion compute figure. He calls the accounting stupid. Money managers in New York focus on the operating loss: $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier.
Warren Buffett spent decades telling investors to focus on book value and said his job as chairman was to grow nominal book value per share. About eight or nine years ago he told them to throw the metric out, calling it the stupidest thing because of new accounting rules. When Berkshire Hathaway invests in plants and equipment or acquires something and t