Supervoting shares are about to hand Dario Amodei outsized control over Anthropic, even though he owns only about 2% of the company. According to a Bloomberg report, Anthropic is preparing to grant Amodei and his six co-founders a new class of stock carrying extra votes per share, ahead of an IPO that bankers reportedly hope could value the company near $2 trillion — a jump from its $965 billion private valuation in May. The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, whose independent members can elect a majority of the board, stays in place alongside the new shares.
Now look at a company on the opposite end of the spectrum. Shein just priced its Hong Kong IPO at roughly $27 billion — a steep drop from the nearly $98 billion investors paid for it in 2022, and less than half the $64 billion tag it carried in 2023 and 2024. You’d expect a company that’s lost three-quarters of its private-market value to hand over more control to whoever’s willing to buy in now. Instead, according to Reuters, the shares sold to the public carry just one-tenth the voting power of the shares founder Sky Yangtian Xu and three co-founders keep for themselves, leaving that small group in command of 90% of Shein’s votes.
Here’s the concept both stories are really about: a supervoting share is a class of stock that carries more votes per share than the ordinary stock sold to the public — sometimes ten times more, sometimes far beyond that. It splits a company into two things that normally travel together: how much of the profit you own, and how much say you get in running the business. Buy a supervoting company’s regular shares, and you own a slice of its future earnings, but the room where decisions actually get made stays closed to you.
What Anthropic and Shein show, side by side, is that this split doesn’t depend on how well the company is doing. Anthropic is using the structure while riding toward one of the largest valuations in tech history. Shein is using nearly the same structure after losing three-quarters of its private-market worth. A soaring company and a shrinking one reached for the identical tool, because the tool was never really about performance — it’s about founders deciding, before the public ever gets a vote, that outside shareholders will own the stock but not the steering wheel. Google did this in 2004, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg still controls his company through a similar setup today.
None of this makes supervoting shares a red flag on their own; plenty of well-run companies use them. But it’s worth knowing what you’re actually buying: economic exposure to a company’s results, without a matching say in how those results get produced. We covered the down-round math behind Shein’s steep valuation reset in an earlier post — this time, the story is about who still holds the wheel, not what the car is worth.
My take: Company fortunes can flip; the mic stays with whoever built it.
Not advice. Just how I see it.