Max Levchin
Founder and CEO of Affirm, the payments network and buy-now-pay-later fintech company. He previously co-founded PayPal, served as its CTO, founded Slide, helped create Yelp, and is an active technology investor; his recent public commentary includes Affirm’s AI-powered agentic commerce strategy.
Anthropic Seeks $30 Billion at More Than $900 Billion Valuation
Bloomberg’s technology program framed the day’s AI trade around access to scarce capacity: Nvidia chips for China, private capital for Anthropic, and manufacturing scale for Anduril. Its central report was that Anthropic is in early talks to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion, a deal Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas said would mark a major shift in the private AI hierarchy if completed. The program also treated Jensen Huang’s last-minute role in Trump’s China trip as a test of whether chip access can become a diplomatic deliverable without undermining Beijing’s domestic semiconductor strategy.
Affirm Targets $100 Billion in Volume as Profitability Floor Rises
Affirm chief executive Max Levchin told Bloomberg that the company’s new $100 billion gross merchandise volume target is a waypoint rather than a ceiling, arguing that the business can grow faster while improving its profitability floor. His case rests on Affirm becoming more than a checkout financing option: consumers are coming directly to the company, merchants are seeking incremental sales through its network, and AI-mediated shopping could put Affirm earlier in the purchase process.