BREAKING: SpaceX, Anthropic, Circular Deals & the State of the Market

Molly O'Shea | SourceryOct 30, 2026

BREAKING: SpaceX, Anthropic, Circular Deals & the State of the Market

Jenny Johnson, CEO of $1.8T AUM Franklin Templeton

Oct 30

$1.8T AUM Market POV

I sat down with Jenny Johnson, CEO of $1.8 TRILLION AUM Franklin Templeton, at their NYC HQ to discuss the state of markets, AI valuations & how the firm got into pre-IPO investments like SpaceX & Anthropic.

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Jenny has long been on my Top 100 Guest list and I am SO excited to finally sit down with her for a very timely conversation!

Is AI in a bubble? When will it pop? Are circular AI deals inflating revenues? What happens when demand for GPUs starts to change? .. Anthropic ..?

We cover it all:

AI Bubble & Circular Deals: AI infrastructure spending, revenue recognition, chip depreciation, and risks in long-term data center financing.
SpaceX & Anthropic: Franklin Templeton’s late-stage venture investments, the SpaceX IPO, and Elon Musk’s ambitions.
Market Conditions: Inflation, interest rates, geopolitical risks, and where Jenny sees opportunities.
Building a $1.8T Asset Manager: 17 acquisitions in six years, the $4.5B Legg Mason deal, and Franklin’s expansion into private markets.
AI & Tokenization: 1,000+ AI agents, an 11% sales uplift, and why blockchain could transform financial infrastructure.

Big thank you to the team at NYSE for providing video production for our interview!

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Jenny Johnson, CEO at Franklin Templeton
(01:08) Where is the market really headed?
(05:34) Why AI is the biggest growth lever
(08:10) Are we in an AI bubble?
(11:28) How Franklin Templeton got into SpaceX and Anthropic
(15:35) The SpaceX question every investor is asking
(18:28) Closing a $4.5B deal in the middle of COVID
(21:39) The strategy behind 17 acquisitions in 6 years
(24:11) How Canvas grew from $2.5B to $30B
(25:12) What makes an acquisition worth the multiple
(28:43) Why blockchain will rebuild finance
(32:50) Will companies stop paying for top AI models?
(37:08) Franklin Templeton’s 70-year climb
(40:21) Who is the modern day Ben Franklin?

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Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson on SpaceX, Anthropic & the Markets

Franklin Templeton Manages $1.8T Under a New Corporate Name

Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion, more than $300 billion of it in alternatives. In August the parent company dropped Franklin Resources and took the Franklin Templeton name, keeping the $BEN ticker on the NYSE. About 1,300 investment professionals work across offices in more than 30 countries, and the firm serves clients in more than 150.

Rupert H. Johnson Sr. founded the firm in New York in 1947 and named it for Benjamin Franklin. Most managers at the time offered a single fund. Franklin Custodian Funds launched with 5. His son Charles B. Johnson took over in 1957 at age 24. The business then had $2.5M in assets, $10,000 in revenue and 1 part-time employee, & he paid himself $300 a month. Fast forward and Franklin crossed $1B in assets in the early 1980s.

The Resources name dates to the 1970s, when stocks were hard to sell and high inflation drove demand for gold investing. Jenny Johnson started in the mail room at 14, ran technology and operations, and became CEO in February 2020.

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Higher Rates, Oil & US-China Read as Business as Usual

Johnson expects sticky inflation and rates that stay higher. Current levels are unusual for the last 25 years and normal across longer history. Leveraged business models face pressure, while cash-flowing companies benefit from a strong US consumer and solid earnings outside the hyperscalers.

“I think inflation’s probably pretty sticky, and rates are probably going to stay higher, but the current rate level is not unusual from a historical standpoint.”

US productivity is running at 2%, which Johnson attributes to digitization and cloud services adopted over 2 decades. From her time running technology at Franklin, the 2 largest adoption barriers are data quality and change management, and she expects current AI to take time to show up in company earnings.

A $20,000 drone can halt a tanker and make insurance hard to obtain in the Strait of Hormuz, though more oil is moving through than expected and the US economy has adjusted to current prices. Johnson sees no quick resolution in the Middle East or Russia and Ukraine. She describes the US and China as more constructive, diverging on tech while relying on each other for rare earths and consumer demand.

Short-Term Debt for Hyperscalers, a Pass on Long-Term Data Center Financing

Johnson separates the economy from the noise around circular financing and revenue recognition in AI. On where the market sits in Gartner’s hype cycle, she sees froth in some areas and draws the line by duration.

“If you’re betting on the needs for energy based on today’s technology, both on the manufacturing as chips as well as the production of energy, you’re assuming that for the next 20 or 30 years, it doesn’t change dramatically.”

Franklin favors shorter-term financing to the hyperscalers. Johnson would avoid long-term data center financing, pointing to AI solving math problems never solved before as a sign of how quickly the technology moves.

“These are not internet bubbled companies that didn’t have revenue. These companies have significant earnings. So they’re going to be able to pay their debt.”

Revenue recognition across AI companies can be apples to oranges, which Johnson cites as the case for active management.

A San Mateo Headquarters Since 1973 Led to SpaceX & Anthropic

Franklin acquired San Mateo-based Winfield & Company in 1973 and moved its offices from New York to California. The firm has been headquartered in Silicon Valley for more than 50 years. Johnson describes founders and venture investors as neighbors and community members, with children attending the same schools, which gives Franklin access to late-stage deals.

Franklin Venture Partners, the private investing platform of Franklin Equity Group, is based at the San Mateo headquarters. The team has deployed over $3B across 95 companies since 2014, in categories including industrial, enterprise, space and defense technology. Its co-head Ryan Biggs has described it as the only private investing arm of a major global asset manager based in Silicon Valley. The listed portfolio includes Anthropic, Anduril and Applied Intuition.

The move into late-stage venture followed companies staying private longer. Portfolio managers stopped getting the performance boost of IPO allocations, and late-stage venture became the stage that IPO underwriting used to cover. Mutual funds and ETFs can hold up to 15% in illiquid assets, and Franklin runs closer to 6% to 8%. Client demand led to a dedicated venture fund that co-invests alongside traditional portfolio managers.

SpaceX closed its $75B IPO, the largest in history, on June 15, 2026, listing under SPCX. Johnson told CNBC on June 10 that Franklin already had exposure and would participate. Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 on October 26 and applied to list on Nasdaq under ANT, with trading possible as soon as mid-November. The filing shows Anthropic will pay SpaceX about $3.1B per month for NVIDIA GPU compute once all promised capacity is delivered.

“I think your only risk there is you have a lot of key man risk with Elon.”

Legg Mason Closed 60 Days Early Through COVID Lockdowns

Franklin announced the $4.5B Legg Mason acquisition 5 days after Johnson became CEO, following a year of work. It was the largest acquisition in the firm’s history and nearly doubled the business. Lockdowns began 3 weeks later and markets fell. Legg Mason added core fixed income, the largest category, & Clarion Partners in real estate. Franklin’s client mix moved from 75% wealth and 25% institutional to an even split.

With travel restricted during lockdowns, Franklin ran the integration over video. The 2 firms had overlapping corporate functions, including finance, HR and legal. Franklin filled each role with the strongest candidate from either firm.

“A big mistake that people who are acquirers do is they just assume that their team is the best team.”

After markets fell, some press coverage said Franklin was locked into the deal. Johnson’s view is that a strategically sound deal holds up through market swings. Asset managers generate strong cash flow and tend to recover with markets, so they rarely sell in a downturn.

“If you’re getting into the deal because it’s a good strategic fit, you’re gonna roll through those sort of ups and downs.”

The deal closed 60 days ahead of schedule.

Canvas, Lexington & BSP Anchor 17 Acquisitions in 6 Years

Clients are consolidating to fewer managers, which rewards breadth and scale. Johnson identifies infrastructure as the only capability Franklin lacks. M&A priorities are infrastructure, distribution outside the US, and growth at Fiduciary Trust, Franklin’s wealth management business.

Canvas came with the O’Shaughnessy Asset Management acquisition, completed in January 2022. OSAM launched Canvas in 2019. The web-based platform lets financial advisors build custom indexes inside separately managed accounts tailored to each client’s needs, preferences and objectives. Holding the underlying stocks directly instead of an index fund or ETF lets advisors harvest tax losses. Canvas also automates tax management and portfolio transitions and manages accounts at scale.

Canvas had just passed $2B when the deal was announced, and Franklin cites more than $18B on the platform in 2026. Franklin has added managed options strategies to Canvas and distributes it through Envestnet, UBS and Janney. Johnson notes Canvas now runs as a tax overlay on active strategies, for clients who want an SMA over an ETF or mutual fund.

Franklin agreed to buy Lexington Partners in 2022 for $1.75B in cash, which Johnson calls full price. Lexington has more than doubled since, with secondary private equity growing faster than Franklin’s models. Benefit Street Partners managed $26B at acquisition and now manages about $97B. 3 bolt-ons added global reach in private credit, and the most recent added asset-backed origination.

“You have a unbelievably good natural retention that you don’t have in traditional, when you buy a traditional asset manager.”

An On-Chain Money Market Fund Opens Accounts at $20

Johnson believes blockchain gives financial services a single real-time source of truth, programmable smart contracts for terms like collateral calls, and built-in payments. Large firms still running mainframes reconcile data in overnight batches and again with counterparties.

“I genuinely believe it will replace the rails in financial services. It’ll be slow because it forces the change of a bunch of business models and the toll takers who take a fee on a transaction.”

Franklin’s on-chain fund launched on Stellar in April 2021 as the first US-registered money market fund to use a public blockchain as its official system of record. The SEC required parallel processing against the legacy transfer agency system. A traditional Franklin money market fund requires $500 to open an account. The on-chain version opens at $20 and could go to $5.

The fund calculates interest every second and pays daily, where traditional funds accrue monthly. In August, the SEC cleared conventional Franklin funds to access the on-chain fund’s faster processing and more frequent pricing. Johnson expects 24/7 trading and atomic settlement to follow.

1,000+ Investment Agents and an 11.3% Sales Lift From Intelligence Hub

Franklin runs more than 1,000 investment-related AI agents supporting more than 800 investment professionals. In investing, the goal is better performance, with analysts spending less time on admin and more on company research. In distribution, the goal is growth. In the back office and technology, an operations AI platform is in production handling transaction analysis and break resolution, and AI-written code moves more projects through the development pipeline.

Intelligence Hub, the distribution platform built with Microsoft, launched in January and extends the AI initiative the 2 firms announced in April 2024. It coordinates multiple agents pulling product data, advisor holdings, ratings and social media to prepare sales meetings. Since launch, Franklin’s top 25 territories have seen a 25% increase in coverage and 11.3% higher sales.

Franklin connects its agents through an AI Harness with approved data sources, compliance controls, auditability and human oversight. Johnson expects enterprise AI spending to change once companies apply governance to how often agents run and route simple queries to free models.

“Do all these agents need to run? And do they need to run as frequently as you set them up to run? And that governance of the discipline, we don’t know what that ultimately impacts these hyperscalers.”

Outlook Centers on AI, Biosciences & Private Markets Access

Johnson’s bull case starts with AI as the largest growth lever and extends to the bioscience drug pipeline, customized medicine, material sciences and 4D printing. She points to a 1997 Business Week cover predicting the internet would eliminate the broker. Financial advisors today use those tools to act as full financial planners.

87% of US companies with more than $100M in revenue are private, and companies are staying private longer. Franklin sees private capital filling financing gaps across AI, energy, housing, infrastructure and healthcare as public budgets stretch and banks pull back. Johnson ties the private markets push to the firm’s founding premise of pooling money to give individual investors diversified access at a reasonable price, and Franklin expects demand to move toward integrated portfolios combining private equity, private credit, real assets and public markets.

“We have to make sure it’s fair and democratized for people to get access while recognizing these are absolutely illiquid vehicles.”

Several of her points line up with other Sourcery interviews. Her view on routing queries to free models matches Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth’s split between frontier & open-weight models, & recent Sourcery guests have described moving most workloads to open-weight models. BlackRock’s Tony Kim set out a 12-month outlook around the AI lab IPOs, which Anthropic’s S-1 now puts on the calendar. Interviews with Cerebras’ Andrew Feldman and SambaNova’s Rodrigo Liang cover the compute buildout behind the data center financing Johnson would keep short-dated.

Why Franklin Templeton Is Named After Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706 and built his early fortune as a printer in Philadelphia. His annual Poor Richard’s Almanack, published from 1732 to 1758, popularized maxims on thrift, saving & industry. He retired from active printing in his early 40s and spent the rest of his life on science, civic institutions & public service.

His inventions include the lightning rod, bifocals & the Franklin stove, & his experiments with electricity earned him international scientific standing. In Philadelphia he helped found a subscription library, a volunteer fire company, a hospital & the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He served as the American envoy to France, helped secure the alliance that supported the Revolution, & signed both the Declaration of Independence & the Constitution. He died in 1790. And yes, don’t forget he’s on the $100 bill.

Franklin left £1,000 each to Boston and Philadelphia in his will, to be lent out and compounded over 200 years. Rupert Johnson Sr. chose the name for Franklin’s emphasis on frugality and prudence in saving & investing. The firm carries the $BEN ticker, and Charles Johnson paid family members $25 to read Franklin’s autobiography.

Asked who the modern-day Benjamin Franklin is, Johnson names Elon Musk. She acknowledges critics who point to philanthropy as a gap and notes Franklin built his wealth before turning to philanthropy.

“I think that there is no person who’s had more significant impact on really where we are in the technological advances today than Elon has.”

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