Good morning and Happy Jobs Report day to all those who celebrate! With an unexpectedly soft 142,000 new jobs added in the US last month, policymakers are looking at rate cuts like it's 1995. Today we're exploring:

Have feedback for us? Just hit reply - we'd love to hear from you!

“A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool?”
“A billion dollars.”

That’s what a young Justin Timberlake told his castmates in a scene from The Social Network — the 2010 film about the rise of Facebook.

Back then, as Silicon Valley was entering its golden era, startups seeking to change the world were doing really well if they were valued at a few million dollars. Any mention of the “B” word was typically reserved for companies making serious waves, with a billion-dollar valuation typically taking years and a revenue (or user) chart that looked like a hockey stick.

Zero to one (billion of cash)

Things have obviously changed a lot since the early 2000s. But few things in the startup world in the intervening years have been quite as remarkable as the news that Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in a round of investment that values the company at $5 billion, according to an exclusive report from Reuters. The company has 10 employees.

That valuation is more than what iconic department store Macy’s ($4.2 billion) is worth. It’s more than triple what pizza giant Papa John’s International is worth.

The wave of AI hype that took Nvidia to a $3 trillion market cap is filtering all the way through the economy, and venture capitalists with deep pockets are willing to take bets that, even just 5 or 6 years ago, would have seemed ludicrous. Clearly, SSI is a special case and the expertise that someone like Ilya Sutskever brings is substantial, but with that kind of deal it is no wonder that nearly all of Silicon Valley’s ambitious founders say they’re working on AI in some shape or form.

Sometimes, they say, less is more… but, with money, more tends to be more. Even millionaires these days think they could do with some extra dough: a new survey from Northwestern Mutual, reported by Quartz, found that only one-third of Americans with at least $1 million worth of investable assets considered themselves “wealthy”.

That’s rich

From 2019 to 2022, the average American family’s net worth increased 23% to just over $1 million, per Business Insider. So, is being a millionaire actually the norm now? 

Well, no. In fact, the median American family’s net worth is only $192,900.

This huge disparity between the average (mean) and the average (median) is because America’s wealth is skewed by its mega-rich. For example, if Bill Gates got into an elevator with me and 8 of my friends, the average net worth of that lift would work out as a little over $13 billion (once we'd finished wondering why the hell he was there).

But exactly how uneven is wealth distribution in the US?

Household wealth data from the Federal Reserve reveals that, in the first quarter of 2024, the top 1% of American households (~1.3 million in total) held 30% of collective wealth, up from 23% in 1990. Meanwhile, the other side of the coin shows the share of wealth held by the bottom 50% (~66 million households) shrunk to just 2.5%.

It seems that the ever-growing reserves of America’s ultra-wealthy have also tilted perspectives on what a lot of money really is. Now, rich people don’t even feel rich, and a sense of ‘money dysmorphia’ (feeling “irrationally insecure about finances”) is trickling down to the masses: in a recent survey by Qualtrics for Credit Karma, 29% of US adults reported experiencing money dysmorphia, while ~45% of Gen Z and millennials said they were “obsessed” with the idea of being rich.

Open rivalry

Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has become synonymous with AI chatbots, inspiring a swathe of competitors. One of those, Claude, is gaining serious traction with users.

From a company called Anthropic — a startup founded by former OpenAI employees (see above for how lucrative being an ex-OpenAI employee can be) — Claude has seen a surge in popularity since the release of Claude 3 in March. And yesterday, the Amazon-backed company announced its latest product, Claude Enterprise.

By entering the enterprise market, Anthropic is now competing for OpenAI’s 1 million corporate users. Like OpenAI, Anthropic’s offering boasts a promise that interactions with Claude won’t be used to train the model itself — a feature designed to appeal to the ongoing concerns around data privacy.

Last month, claude.ai received over 15 million visits across web and mobile platforms in the US, according to data from Similarweb. While those numbers are impressive, they still pale in comparison to ChatGPT’s 337 million visits in the same month — a gap that’s also reflected in the relative valuations, with Anthropic’s ~$18 billion valuation significantly overshadowed by OpenAI’s $100+ billion price tag.

With over 90% of Fortune 500 companies reportedly using some iteration of its products, OpenAI has a serious head start. But history shows that being first doesn’t guarantee long-term success. After all, Amazon wasn’t the first online marketplace, and Google wasn’t the first search engine. The chatbot wars are just getting started.

Off the charts: The long-awaited sequel to Todd Phillips’ Joker premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday — but how long did the standing ovation that the movie received go on for?

Answer here.

Thanks for stopping by!

Have some feedback or want to sponsor this newsletter?

Not a subscriber? Sign up for free below.

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate... See more