...with his jaw on the floor.
My neighbors are moving next week.
For the past year they've rented the four-bedroom apartment next door for $10,000 a month. After putting in their notice, I saw the apartment re-listed—and quickly rented—on Zillow for $14,000 a month, a 40% increase.
Wow, I thought, San Francisco is WILD.
Little did I know...
I ran into one of the moving neighbors this afternoon and asked where they're going. "We bought a house in the Richmond," he said, then proceeded to fill me in on their home-buying nightmare. During the bidding process to buy their new place, he told me that he and his wife exceeded their best and final offer three times before one was finally accepted. I asked him why they felt so compelled to buy that particular home amid such fierce competition. "The San Francisco real estate market is about to level up," he said, "and then some."
"Why's that?" I asked, genuinely curious as to how it could possibly get worse.
"When Anthropic goes public next month," he said, "it will create about 100 new billionaires in San Francisco."
"Billionaires?" I asked. "With a b? In San Francisco?"
"Billionaires," he said. "We have friends at Anthropic who are already spending money like it's going out of style. Banks are lending to them at really low rates as long as they'll let them manage their money once the IPO happens."
"Billionaires?" I asked again. "100 more? In San Francisco?"
He nodded solemnly.
Afterward, I did a little digging. While my research couldn't confirm the 100 new billionaires number, according to The New York Times, when all is said and done, the upcoming mega-IPO boom—anchored by Anthropic, OpenAI, and the newly public SpaceX—is projected to mint more than 16,000 new millionaires.
16,000 new millionaires...
I'm sorry, remind me what AI does again?