PERSON
Aswath Damodaran
The NYU Stern professor whose narrative-to-numbers framework made every AI valuation a falsifiable story—and whose DBOT test revealed that what the machine cannot replicate is not expertise but judgment: the capacity to decide which story to tell before any numbers are run.
Aswath Damodaran has spent four decades at NYU's Stern School of Business teaching the same lesson with the patience that only a true believer in a simple truth can sustain: every stock price is a story about the future that has been translated into numbers, and every bad investment is a story that nobody tested against arithmetic. The “Dean of Valuation”—a title that emerged from the sheer cumulative weight of his teaching materials, made freely available online for anyone to use—is the person who made the
SaaSpocalypse of early 2026 legible: the trillion-dollar repricing of software companies was not a verdict on whether AI was real (it is) but on whether the story that had sustained software valuations for two decades had broken (it had). The difficulty of building software had been the source of the industry's pricing power; AI had lowered the difficulty dramatically; the market repriced the narrative. The question Damodaran pressed