Henry Blodget on the Software Selloff Hysteria and the Problem for OpenAI

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:08)

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to On Air Fest 2026

Thank you so much. I'm Kristen Meinzer. I'm your emcee for the day. And in case you don't know who I am, I'm a podcaster, I'm a royal watcher, I'm a culture critic. I've been very busy over the last week with some royal news you may have heard of. So you may know me from those things. But today is not about me. It is about the fantastic talent that is going to be on the stage. And at this festival, let's get to our first live taping of the day, Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. The hosts of Odd Lots are Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway. Please welcome them to the stage along with their very special guest, Henry Blodget. Thank you so much. Welcome to the stage.

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

Thank you so much, and hello, and welcome to a live episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (1:09)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (1:10)

Tracy, we're definitely not going to do this, but it definitely feels like almost every episode could be about AI these days, right? Like, it's just touching, so all the things we talk about are slowly getting subsumed into this topic that we're not gonna do it, but we probably could.

Tracy Alloway (1:25)

It's not just that every episode could be on AI, it's that every episode could probably be made by AI at this point, right? And in fact, we've had a few people last year, I remember there were a few people who made AI-generated episodes of the podcast, and they weren't that bad, and I have to think if they did it today, they would be even better.

Joe Weisenthal (1:42)

It would definitely be better. Anyway, not better than us, but they would be better than they were a year ago.

Tracy Alloway (1:47)

I'm not so sure.

Joe Weisenthal (1:48)

They'd be better than they were a year ago. Anyway, so we have to talk about AI and what it's doing to the market, finance, economics, et cetera, and of course, we have to talk about what it means for us in the media industry. And I'm very excited to say, we do have the perfect guest, we're going to be speaking here with Henry Blodget, the CEO of Regenerator. He used to be my boss when I was at Business Insider, someone who has a background in both media and of course, Wall Street and finance, so the perfect person to talk about all the different dimensions.

Tracy Alloway (2:17)

Truly the perfect guest.

Joe Weisenthal (2:18)

All right, Henry, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

Henry Blodget (2:21)

Thank you for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (2:22)

So the last time we talked to you was in May of last year, and the theme then was everyone was talking about, here are these huge evaluations for AI companies. How could they possibly be justified? And that was an interesting conversation. And it feels like the narrative has now flipped 180 degrees, where it's like these companies are so powerful, they're going to destroy every other company in their wake, and every software company and payments provider, etc. has been plunging really since the start of the year. How have you updated your views? Where are you now versus where you were in, say, May?

Henry Blodget (2:54)

We are early in the development of the industry. This looks a lot like the Internet in the 1990s. For those of you who remember, basically, when you have a huge opportunity like this, early on, you can have a huge range of reasonable predictions about what is going to happen. And here we, one day, it's catastrophe. None of us are ever going to have a job again. Everything is going to crater. Other days, hey, it's just a fancy word processor. No worries. OpenAI is way overvalued. I will say that since we talked last, I believe that we were aghast at the OpenAI $300 billion valuation. I believe the latest one is $800 billion. So we are climbing. But there are other companies out there that are worth many times that. So if one does think that AI is going to take over the world, and OpenAI is the Google of the AI era, which is the thesis, which I think is very misguided, we can get into, then one can imagine that a company might be worth many multiples of some of the companies that are out there.

Tracy Alloway (3:53)

So one of the crazy things that happened this week, speaking of AI and media, is there's a guy, we've had him on the show, James Van Gelen, aka Cetrini, he runs a hedge fund, also publishes an investment newsletter. He basically wrote a doom case scenario of the year 2028, where everything had become AI, and because everything was AI, no one had any jobs, no one was actually buying anything in the economy, and we basically had an economic and financial crisis. When I read that piece and then saw the market reaction to it, so stocks fell pretty dramatically and people were attributing it to basically a newsletter that was a thought piece, I thought that was kind of insane, and it speaks to what you just said, which is when we're in this really uncertain time, you can go from sort of euphoria to doomerism very, very quickly.