Aswath Damodaran

Aswath Damodaran is a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and arguably the most influential teacher of corporate valuation globally. His books — including "Damodaran on Valuation", "Investment Valuation", and "The Dark Side of Valuation" — have sold millions of copies worldwide. He publishes annual datasets on valuations, cost of capital, and risk premiums for every global sector, freely available on his website. Damodaran is known for his direct, opinionated approach to valuing specific companies — including highly publicized analyses of Tesla, Uber, and Apple. His YouTube lectures have been viewed tens of millions of times. His insistence on valuation as a discipline grounded in cash flow forecasting and discount rate estimation — rather than relative valuation multiples or narrative alone — has helped a generation of analysts and investors develop more rigorous and consistent approaches to assessing fair value across different industries, geographies, and market conditions.