Descriptions:
NYU Stern finance professor Aswath Damodaran — the Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education and one of the world’s most cited experts on corporate valuation — joins Scott Galloway’s Prof G Markets podcast to analyze how the AI revolution is distorting public equity markets in ways that conventional valuation frameworks struggle to capture. The central argument: Anthropic’s recent product releases triggered roughly $2 trillion in software market capitalization destruction across companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow, but the corresponding value creation is flowing into private AI companies that don’t appear in public indices.
Damodaran contends that markets have spent two years pricing in all the upside of AI disruption while systematically ignoring the disrupted, and that software is only the first industry to absorb this impact. He warns that consulting firms like Accenture and other service businesses built on human cognitive labor face similar structural threats as AI capabilities expand. Until major AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI go public, he argues, stock indices will accumulate losses from incumbents without capturing gains from disruptors — a structural problem for passive investors and index funds.
The conversation also examines the broader geopolitical context, including the challenge of valuing companies in jurisdictions undergoing rapid regulatory and trade realignment, and why the gray market for late-stage private AI companies (where public mutual funds like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price participate directly in private rounds) produces stale and unreliable price signals. Damodaran’s framework is particularly useful for investors trying to construct a coherent picture of where AI economic value is actually accruing.
📺 Source: The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway · Published February 20, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
