Banker Offers $4.8M Home for Anthropic Shares
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- Storm Duncan, founder of tech boutique bank Ignatious, listed his $4.8 million, 13-acre Mill Valley estate in exchange for Anthropic shares, telling Business Insider: "If you're going fishing, you've got to put a worm on the hook."
- Anthropic's secondary-market valuation soared to $1 trillion, driven by torrid revenue growth — the company is on track for a $50 billion revenue run rate — and momentum around its AI coding assistant Claude Code.
- Duncan says he has received multiple offers since posting the deal, from both Anthropic employees holding illiquid pre-IPO stock and early investors, though he calls it "a complex transaction."
- The Mill Valley property features San Francisco views, an infinity-edge pool, and a spa, and sits a 20-minute commute from Anthropic's offices — which Duncan picked specifically to appeal to company staff.
- Small investors are locked out of buying Anthropic directly because the company "is looking for people who can write $100 million in a single check," pushing them to opaque secondary markets with high fees.
- Duncan already owns Anthropic shares from its 2024 funding round and says implementing Claude Code at his firm — which he estimates will "triple throughput and reduce costs by 50%" — convinced him he wanted more exposure.
- Skeptics on X have dismissed the offer as a publicity stunt or a sure sign of a market top, while others joked that Bay Area real estate is the only thing more precious than Anthropic shares.
Why it matters: For ordinary investors shut out of private AI companies, Duncan's property-for-shares gambit exposes the extreme scarcity of Anthropic stock on secondary markets, where a $1 trillion valuation now prices the company higher than most public corporations. For Anthropic employees holding illiquid pre-IPO paper, a tangible-asset barter could offer a rare path to diversification before any public listing.
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