Podbit · Excess Returns

The Trillion Dollar Gap | Aswath Damodaran on SpaceX, AI and the Big Market Delusion

Explore episode Jun 19, 2026

Business

How to Revive Value Investing for the Intangible Age

The Trillion Dollar Gap | Aswath Damodaran on SpaceX, AI an… · Jun 19, 2026 Business

Value investing can evolve, but it needs to abandon three habits. First, drop 'I will never buy Tesla or SpaceX' — any company is worth buying at the right price. Second, stop hunting for accounting conspiracies in footnotes while missing the forest for the trees. Third, accept that book value is an obsolete proxy for company worth and learn to value intangible assets and future growth properly.

Where this was said

Why investing mistakes and track records are harder to judge than they look

At 1:06:12 · chapter starts 1:04:57

Three prescriptions: drop 'never buy' rules, stop hunting accounting conspiracies, and embrace uncertainty plus intangible assets as legitimate value sources. Any company is a buy at the right price.^{[1]

— Aswath Damodaran

"Value investing can evolve, but it needs to abandon three habits. First, drop 'I will never buy Tesla or SpaceX' — any company is worth buy…"

1:06:12}

You can be a lucky investor and beat the market 15 years out of 20 all the time. So I think that track records — people think that they backtested something over the track record, they've got a conclusive way of making money. It doesn't work.

Aswath Damodaran

The Trillion Dollar Gap | Aswath Damoda…

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