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Punters winning more NFL bets are set to dent FanDuel owner Flutter’s profits

The house always wins — just a little less last quarter.

1/8/25 11:37AM

DraftKings’ biggest rival and the world’s largest online-betting company, Flutter Entertainment, is seeing a short-term hit to its bottom line from customers’ sweetest dream: gamblers are winning too much.

In a surprise trading update on Tuesday, the group (emphasis ours) detailed that:

“The 2024/2025 NFL season to date has been the most customer friendly since the launch of online sports betting with the highest rate of favorites winning in nearly 20 years.”

The “very unfavorable US sports results” are set to cost Flutter Entertainment some ~$390 million in revenue, with the company’s shares listed in London opening down 5% this morning — though the stock has since recovered all of that initial drop, with rival DraftKings also trading higher.

It’s ironic that it should be the NFL — America’s favorite league to bet on — at the heart of Flutter’s current issues, as the Dublin-headquartered group has increasingly placed its own chips on the US market, including abandoning the London Stock Exchange to move its primary listing to New York last May.

Since first combining with FanDuel seven years ago, Flutter has grown rapidly, capitalizing on the changing regulatory landscape in America, which has quickly become the company’s most important region: revenues from the US market now account for 38% of its business, up from just 12% in 2020.

Elsewhere, sports results continued a “good momentum” in the UK and Ireland region (read: punters are still losing on the English Premier League).

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Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s CEO and founder, was also an early Anthropic investor

A chess prodigy and an actual a knight of the realm in the UK, it’s perhaps no surprise that Demis Hassabis has made some strategic moves about his exposure to AI upside. According to people familiar with the matter, the influential AI architect became an angel investor in Anthropic, currently behind many of the leading AI models, per Arena AI leaderboards.

The Nobel Prize winner’s position in the Claude creator was previously undisclosed and, per the Financial Times, highlights Hassabis’ “growing influence across the AI industry.”

Google, which bought DeepMind, the company that Hassabis cofounded and heads to this day, for a reported ~$400 million in 2014, is also a key Anthropic investor. The tech giant reportedly plans to invest up to $40 billion in the AI company as part of the mutually beneficial relationship the pair have forged, with reports that Anthropic has committed to spending $200 billion in the other direction on Google’s cloud services over the next five years.

I’m playing all sides, so I always come out on top

In addition to his financial support for Anthropic, Hassabis has also invested in a range of AI startups launched by colleagues, such as Inflection AI, a company set up by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman (who is now CEO of Microsoft AI), as well as efforts from other collaborators, like David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence.

Hassabis also emerged as a recurring figure on the fringes of the recent Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial, cropping up repeatedly in testimonies and court documents and appearing to live, as The Verge put it, “rent-free” in Musk’s head.

Founded in 2021, Anthropic has recently raised funding at a reported $900 billion valuation, sending it soaring ahead of competitor OpenAI.

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis emerges as early Anthropic investor

The Nobel Prize winner’s position in the Claude creator was previously undisclosed and, per the Financial Times, highlights Hassabis’ “growing influence across the AI industry.”

I’m playing all sides, so I always come out on top

Founded in 2021, Anthropic has recently raised funding at a reported $900 billion valuation, sending it soaring ahead of competitor OpenAI.

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