Money Doesn’t Call the Shots

Anthropic reports an $80 billion loss, while Meta seeks new capital despite earning billions in profit. The two companies’ financing decisions raise questions about who makes the decisions, as well as who pays for growth.

Buying 1% of a company does not necessarily give you a 1% say in its decisions.

That is the most interesting aspect of the announcements from Anthropic and Meta on 26 October.

The scale of the AI race is now evident not only in the models being developed, but also in the capital structures used to finance them. As companies prepare to offer new investors a share of future earnings, they are looking for ways to retain control over management.

At first glance, the figures in Anthropic’s IPO filing are startling.

Revenue of $16.3 billion in the first six months of 2026. A net loss of $80.7 billion.

Yet approximately $72.4 billion of that loss comes from accounting changes in the value of convertible financing instruments and related liabilities. In other words, the company did not burn through $80.7 billion in cash in six months. Its operating loss for the same period was approximately $693 million.

The distinction matters. An accounting loss arising from the valuation of financing instruments is different from cash lost through day-to-day operations. And if those instruments convert into equity in the future, they may affect existing shareholders’ stakes.

The most striking detail, however, lies outside the income statement.

Under the structure Anthropic has prepared for its IPO, a partnership formed by seven founders will hold 50.1% of shareholder voting rights. A separate body, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, will have the authority to appoint a majority of the board.

IPO investors will therefore share in the company’s economic future without gaining a proportionate say in its decisions. The price and size of the offering have not yet been announced.

On the same day, Meta launched an offering of approximately $35 billion in new shares and mandatory convertible preferred stock. It also plans to establish a programme that could raise up to a further $60 billion in 2027 through new, non-voting Class C shares. That second programme has not yet been finalised.

Meta’s third-quarter net profit was $9.86 billion. Yet free cash flow for the same period was negative $2.12 billion. With $82.45 billion in liquid assets at the end of September, the company’s move should not be interpreted as a cash squeeze.

The central issue is how to finance spending on data centres and computing infrastructure today, before the resulting revenue arrives.

As Meta develops new sources of capital for these investments, it also aims to preserve the existing distribution of voting rights through future issues of non-voting shares. The $35 billion offering already launched does not consist entirely of non-voting shares.

This brings renewed attention to a longstanding but often overlooked distinction in corporate finance: economic ownership and management control are not the same thing.

Such a structure is not necessarily a bad one. It may allow founders to pursue a long-term strategy. But it also changes the risk investors take. If expected growth fails to materialise, they may share the economic loss without sharing an equivalent ability to reverse a poor investment decision.

Valuing a company therefore requires more than an assessment of future profits. It also requires an examination of the rights attached to those profits and who will retain decision-making authority.

This is a familiar issue in Türkiye.

The capital structures disclosed on KAP, Türkiye’s Public Disclosure Platform, show that some companies grant Class A shares several times the voting rights of Class B shares. Buying 30% of a company therefore does not always mean being able to exercise 30% of the influence over its management decisions.

For many businesses in Türkiye, however, the most pressing problem differs from that facing the global technology giants.

The Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye cut its policy rate to 36% on 22 October. By contrast, the weighted average annual interest rate on Turkish-lira commercial loans stood at 48.44% in the week of 16 October. September’s manufacturing PMI was in contraction territory at 47.9, while October’s consumer confidence index stood at 84.8.

These indicators do not suggest that every business faces the same conditions. Indeed, data from TOBB, the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Türkiye, show that the number of companies established in the first nine months of the year rose by 5.4% compared with the same period a year earlier. But how to finance growth is a serious management decision, particularly for companies facing weaker orders, longer collection periods and expensive funding.

Consider a business with annual sales of TRY 100 million whose customers take an average of 15 days longer to pay. If sales are spread evenly throughout the year, approximately TRY 4.1 million more remains tied up in receivables.

Before investing in AI, that business may need to understand where its cash is tied up, and for how long.

Bringing in a new shareholder may remove the need to pay interest on a loan, but it also means giving up a share of future profits. Borrowing may preserve the ownership structure, but it adds regular payment obligations to cash flow.

Both choices have a cost. One appears in financing expenses. The other takes the form of sharing the company’s future economic value.

That is why an investment decision cannot rest on expected growth alone. When the project will generate cash, who will finance it until then, and which rights will be transferred in return all need to be assessed together.

The issue raised by Anthropic and Meta applies to companies in Türkiye too: securing new capital matters, but understanding how much of the company’s future is being given up in return matters more.