Mill Valley homeowner aims to get ahead of AI by selling his estate for equity in Anthropic
A Bay Area homeowner is making a unique play to get ahead of the artificial intelligence arms race by listing his Mill Valley estate not for cash but for equity in Anthropic.
It's a 14-acre estate in Mill Valley, and the homeowner priced it for about $8 million. But he doesn't want your money. He wants your stock.
"I felt underexposed to AI, which is the future in my mind. And overexposed to real estate. And so, the concept was very simple. I was assuming there would be a bunch of young up-and-coming successful people at Anthropic that started there, and maybe had a little bit of money but not much and now are worth a significant amount of money, but it's all in one stock," Storm Duncan, the founder of Ignatius, told CBS News Bay Area.
As an M&A banker, he is looking for a buyer who will trade their stock in Anthropic, an AI company that is estimated to be worth $1 trillion.
"One person at Anthropic reached out, he's like I don't want to live there but I think it's a good diversification strategy," Duncan said.
"You have to be comfortable with the concept of exchanging that for a portion of your interest in Anthropic stock," he added.
Butch Haze, a luxury real estate specialist with Compass, said this AI boom reminds him of the Bitcoin craze.
"It's a really smart seller," he said. "These are really unique times. It will be interesting for the title companies. How do they process the title work and do the actual trades? And how does the city collect taxes on the transfer tax? So, there are some things to work out here."
He said that because of heightened interest in Anthropic, which is a privately-owned company, there may be some uncertainty.
"The question is, would a buyer right now give up their Anthropic stock? And I think that's the bigger question," Haze said.
Jay Ritter, the director of the IPO Initiative at the University of Florida, said there is speculation that Anthropic will go public within the next year.
"From a motivated seller, maybe an employee of the company that does have all their eggs in one basket and who wants to buy a house in this specific area, it might make sense," he said. "I don't expect selling a home for stock in a private company to be a trend. I think maybe there will be some copycats, but this is not something that your average middle-class investor is going to be doing."
Duncan, however, sees it differently.
"There's people like myself, like can't we democratize this? Can't we provide access to some people that aren't normally going to get access to this opportunity? So, I think you're going to see a lot more people trying to follow my lead in that regard and get access because everybody's anxious that you're either in AI or you're going down," he said.
Duncan added that there are no serious buyers yet, but there are some conversations.