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The Trillion Dollar Gap | Aswath Damodaran on SpaceX, AI and the Big Market Delusion
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Why traditional value investing lost its edge
At 52:50 · chapter starts 52:29
Damodaran received a settlement from Anthropic for using 12 of his books in training. He discusses unresolved tensions around IP monetization, government shutdown risk, and whether LLMs should provide engines or compete directly.
Software companies enjoy near-zero marginal costs at scale — the next unit of output costs almost nothing. AI may be fundamentally different: like Spotify, where every stream requires a new payment, LLMs may face persistent per-unit costs from power, water, data, and compute that never scale away. If true, the margin expansion the market is pricing in for AI may never arrive.
