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Odd Lots

Affirm's Max Levchin Breaks Down How Buy Now, Pay Later Really Works

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Levchin probably knows as much about online payments as anyone. He was part of the original "PayPal mafia" before going on to become co-founder and CEO of Affirm, the $22 billion player in the Buy Now, Pay Later industry that's hoping to disrupt the incumbent credit card companies. While BNPL is booming, there is still a lot of confusion about how it works, how it makes money, and how transparent its activities are. On this episode, we speak with Max about why he started his company, and why he believes that BNPL offers a superior product to traditional forms of payment and credit. We also discuss the current state of the economy, AI, and what he sees as the role of crypto in payments.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

You're being sold an AI future where you're obsolete or irrelevant.

0:04.0

That vision is wrong.

0:06.0

At Palantir, they're building AI that helps workers and unlocks their full potential.

0:12.0

American workers are our nation's greatest strength.

0:16.0

AI shouldn't eliminate them. It should elevate them.

0:19.0

Palantir is here to tell their stories. From factories

0:23.0

to hospitals, AI is freeing people from drudgery, letting them do what humans do best. Create, solve,

0:31.0

build. Palantir, making Americans irreplaceable. Maybe you already know about naked short selling.

0:38.2

Maybe you personally shorted stocks yourself.

0:40.6

But do you know about the time short sellers ruined a Super Bowl, basically?

0:45.3

For me, I was a little late, but red flags went up like, what is going on?

0:49.4

This is really scary.

0:51.2

At Planet Money, we get the story behind the money to explain how money works.

0:56.1

Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:02.7

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

1:04.9

Podcasts Radio News.

1:07.2

Music. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall.

1:22.9

And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, it feels like everybody, whether they want to come after the banks, right?

1:29.4

There is this effort.

1:31.3

So many of our episodes, whether we're talking about crypto, whether we're talking about private

1:35.8

credit, whether we're talking about payments, it's this goal, this dream of like, let's chip

1:40.1

away at some of these bank businesses or these businesses that were associated with some

...

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