Anthropic’s 7 cofounders are splitting $200 billion almost evenly, down to the last stock option

Anthropic’s seven cofounders are lining up for one of the strangest paydays in tech. If the company goes public at the valuation some media reports say it wants — between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion — the group could wind up with stock worth as much as $200 billion in total, divided almost perfectly evenly.

Each founder, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, holds between 231 million and 244 million shares. Fortune’s math puts each person’s slice in the rough range of $21 billion to $30 billion. The structure is unusually flat for a company this large: no obvious pay pyramid, no founder at the top hoarding the best of it. Instead, the seven appear to hold nearly identical stakes and each gets one vote in the entity that will control the shareholder vote.

The filing also shows how carefully Anthropic has kept the group aligned. The founders’ equity includes 2,185,400 stock options apiece that can be exercised now, plus 639,500 restricted stock units that vest after the IPO. The Amodeis are the only two named in the pay tables because they’re the only cofounders counted as executive officers, but the other five — Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clark and Chris Olah — appear to have received the same awards, down to the same numbers within a few shares.

That equality extends to pay. Last year, Dario and Daniela each took $654,167 in salary, and in July both were bumped to $1.4 million. In February, each also got about 1.4 million stock options and 2.4 million more RSUs, followed by another 537,000 RSUs in July. At a $2 trillion valuation, those grants would be worth about $505 million each.

It’s a very different setup from the usual founder hierarchy, and a very different one from SpaceX, where Elon Musk’s rewards dwarf everyone else’s. Anthropic’s founders have also pledged to give 80% of their stock to charity, though those pledges aren’t legally binding. Even then, they’d still keep control of the company. They can’t sell right away, but once the lockup lifts, the money starts becoming real instead of theoretical, which is usually when the trouble begins.