Di-SaaS-ter Market
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: Anthropic released an update that seems to have tipped the scales against Software as a Service companies, erasing billions in market value. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck, unpack why there was such a massive market response to such a small AI plugin, and what it says about the future of tech investment. Then, Disney has finally named a new CEO in Josh D’Amaro. The hosts get what it says about the future of the company that they chose the head Disney Experiences, including their super-profitable theme parks, instead of its Hollywood division. And then, a report has claimed users lose money on prediction markets faster than on traditional gambling apps which Kalshi claimed was an extortion tactic before walking back its statement. The hosts get into the differences between how users interact with the two kinds of apps and what the data says about losses on each.
In the Slate Plus episode: Epstein and the business of luxury gifting.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. |
| 0:17.3 | I'm Felix Amman of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. |
| 0:21.2 | Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios Markets. Hello, hello. And we are going to talk about |
| 0:27.7 | markets this week. We're going to talk about the Saspocalypse in the way that all of these |
| 0:32.8 | software stocks are imploding. We are going to talk about the new CEO at Disney and what that means. |
| 0:40.3 | And it's the Super Bowl this week. |
| 0:42.7 | And there's people betting on Kaushi and prediction markets. |
| 0:45.5 | I'm going to talk about that and whether they're going to lose all their money. |
| 0:48.4 | We have a Slate Plus segment on luxury gifting. |
| 0:51.2 | It's all coming up on slate money. |
| 1:07.1 | All right. |
| 1:07.7 | So, Sasspocalypse, I feel like this is a terrible word. Can we all agree on that? |
| 1:13.9 | SAS was always bad. Saspocalypse is better? |
| 1:17.0 | Yeah, Sass was always bad. |
| 1:18.8 | Sounds a little bit like Aspocalypse. |
| 1:21.0 | Plus, it's S-A-A-A-S, but it's pronounced S-A-S-S. I don't know. The whole thing is just terrible. |
| 1:28.3 | I like it. |
| 1:34.5 | Okay. Emily, as the person who likes it, before we get to the apocalypse bit, tell us what the SaaS bit is. What does SaaS stand for? Isn't it obvious? It's software as a service. It's like |
| 1:41.0 | when your company buys some kind of software that manages your expenses or your |
| 1:47.3 | days off or your payroll or your travel, then you subscribe to the software. It is a service. |
| 1:53.5 | And a company behind the scenes is, you know, servicing the software. So it updates or whatever. |
| 1:59.2 | And you use it. And your company pays for like 30 of these |
... |
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