Felix Salmon Writes on finance and markets, now as a senior writer at Bloomberg, after years as chief financial correspondent at Axios, and is the author of The Phoenix Econ...

“I'm just going to come out and say that AI and the AI space is pretty much the most competitive and least monopolistic space that I have seen in a while. There are so many different models. … To say that any of them has a monopoly in AI, the only real monopoly I can see in AI is NVIDIA. And even that one is being eroded because everyone's building their own chips now.”

Slate Money · October 2026

The Slate Money hosts argued over whether today's AI giants are on their way to becoming monopolies with no political will to stop them. Salmon pushes back, pointing to the number of competing models and the startups that route work to whichever one is cheapest.

Slate Money · 2026-10-24 Listen to the episode → More from Felix Salmon →

Transcript

Slate Money Around 19:07 into the episode

Felix Salmon

…It's a big company, but if that's all it did was like send rockets into space and have satellite connected telephony, it wouldn't be anywhere near a trillion dollar company. It would be like a $200 billion company at most. It is not like a massive giant monopoly in the way that Alphabet is.

Speaker 4

…where there is no political will really at all to put guardrails around these companies that are potentially going to become monopolies and seem to be on the road to do it because there's no kind of feeling in Congress or in any part of the government that this is bad. There's no antitrust.

Felix Salmon

Number one, it is just a fact that the way that American antitrust law works, if you grow into a monopolistic position, that's basically fine. Merging your way or acquiring your way into a monopoly is bad, but just competing your way into a monopoly, there's very few laws against that. But second, I'm just going to come out and say that AI and the AI space is pretty much the most competitive and least monopolistic space that I have seen in a while. There are so many different models. There are all of these new billion-dollar startups that all they do is they point your compute needs at whichever model is cheapest this minute. You have Alphabet, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, all competing with each other in this front. To say that any of them has a monopoly in AI, the only real monopoly I can see in AI is NVIDIA. And even that one is being eroded because everyone's building their own chips now.

Speaker 2

I'm not saying that these companies, these giant tech companies have a monopoly in AI yet. I agree that the competition is intense right now. And it's not clear who emerges the winner. I'm saying that there are these big monopolistic tech companies that have so much friggin money that they're at…

Felix Salmon

but look at DeepSeek. To just take one example. There's like at least three cheap, powerful Chinese AI models out there that are. Competing aggressively, and they're not just going to get bought up and absorbed.

Speaker 2

I don't know. I don't know if I agree totally.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Slate Money

“If you look at the experiments that have been done with various agentic AIs, so if you tell them to go out and buy whatever the cheapest thing is, what they often do is they kind of look at your emails and understand who you are … And invariably, if you are like a richer, more middle-class person, they wind up coming back with more expensive stuff, even if you said, find me the cheapest.” — Felix Salmon, Slate Money