And they pay their employees even a fourth of that monthly, right? Right?
That’s the amount they paid employees, so they paid all of that. Unless you mean just the non c level employees, if be surprised if the c suite is more than a quarter of total comp though.
The lede
The vast majority of that money isn’t actually landing in employees’ bank accounts
Further down
The largest share, $1.1 billion, came from Anthropic’s stock-based compensation expenses, which reflect the value of company shares employees earn as part of their pay. Anthropic records that value as an expense even though employees don’t receive the equivalent amount in cash.
It’s fake money.
Eh, stock comp is real comp. They can’t sell it at the moment, but if the $2T IPO is anywhere near a success, they’ll make absolute bank.
More companies, especially startups, should do stock based comp. It gives the employees a vested interest in the conpany and a share in the success. When the owners cash out, the employees get at least a small windfall too. Normally, the employees just get a worse work environment.
My point is that the cost of stocks is an accounting cost like interdepartmental services (eg billing the cost of the owned building based on headcount), not “real” in terms of inflow/outflow (sales of service turning into employee pay.)
The stock part is a bit of a lottery ticket, but it would be sellable at IPO.
Yeah, mostly the latter. I was being facetious to make the point that any company that sees success makes it the norm to not reward those that made it possible which I would like see a change in doing so.