“We have definitely reached the point in the AI bubble at which people just feel they need to get on this train at any price.” Felix Salmon · Slate Money
September 2026
The panel was working through Stripe's acquisition of an AI payments company and whether a chatbot could plausibly handle the unglamorous plumbing of finance. Salmon says it cannot, and that this has stopped mattering to buyers. He notes the same price-insensitivity is now turning up in the M&A market, not just in venture rounds.
Transcript
financial plumbing.
So that you couldn't just replace
and I don't, yeah, I don't see how, I don't really see how ChatGPT can do financial plumbing. We have definitely reached the point in the AI bubble at which people just feel they need to get on this train at any price. And the people driving the train are completely price insensitive. And this is showing up in a bunch of different ways. And it's now showing up in the M ⁇ A markets, which is kind of interesting.
Well, when we first talked about talking about this, if you want to get meta, not meta, like Facebook, just meta meta. I said, wow, this is a big deal, $12.9 billion. And Felix was like, is it? NVIDIA is worth, you know, more than $4 trillion. This is like nothing for them. Like they get out of bed and like cough and spend $12 billion.
Exactly. Yeah. I think for NVIDIA compared to their market cap, a $12 billion acquisition is a rounding error. For Stripe, it's huge.
Strategically, though, it is interesting because it's NVIDIA sort of really getting behind open weight models, which are in some ways competitive to AI and Anthropic. Yes. And they've been trying to sort of talk OpenAI and Anthropic out of closed models. Systems for a while. And so this is just them putting their money where their mouth is. Well,
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