James Altucher
Investor & Author, Technology & Markets
Adobe could eventually be dead as intelligence becomes an abundant commodity and anyone can edit their own videos and photos. Claude, OpenAI and open-weight models such as Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek are in a price fight to zero, so years of developer work no longer form a moat. The new moats are trust, distribution and hard-to-get data. x.comÂ
Adobe's core value is being eroded because gen AI increasingly excels at what Adobe did better than anyone: generating and editing images, video, audio and designs. Adobe likely has no proprietary data advantage, or at least none visible, the gap a quoted post says would leave it more exposed to AI disruption. Bulls may know better. x.comÂ
Adobe is hard to want to own after an open-source project reimplemented its full software suite, as @math_fournity reports. x.comÂ
Adobe's moat may be that no artists want to build their own Photoshop or Premiere, even as everyone in finance thinks they can vibe code Bloomberg and has the money to try. x.comÂ
Adobe faces an existential AI question: if anyone can edit an image or generate a video with a text prompt, what is Photoshop for? Image and video generation is changing faster than almost any field but code, threatening the complex interfaces Creative Cloud was built on, and Adobe relies on Google, OpenAI, Midjourney and others for frontier models. Canva and startups are attacking pieces of the suite. Pixel-perfect editing and Firefly's $250M ARR, up 75% a quarter, are the bull case. x.comÂ
Claude can replace Adobe for PDF editing in minutes. A custom editor took 15 minutes to build, avoided paying Adobe and had more options; Adobe is done for the long term. x.comÂ
Adobe is a bit undervalued, though not significantly, at 13x earnings with 13% revenue growth. Its falling profit margin is concerning, and AI threats are growing as image generation improves. x.comÂ
Adobe looks dead because AI can now generate images in 0.6 seconds, undercutting the value case for buying it. The stock is losing its 200-month average, a 20-year average price that only a truly dead name breaks, making it something to avoid. x.comÂ
Adobe is falling despite growing revenue and earnings because AI is disrupting its core image- and PDF-editing products, and that kind of disruption simply takes time to show up in the numbers. Newspapers after the internet and BlackBerry after the iPhone followed the same path. Anyone using AI to edit images or PDFs can see it. x.comÂ
Adobe's AI-first ARR passing $500M and growing more than 150% year over year is a strong answer to the belief that AI will only hurt the company. AI is still a small part of the business, but the quarter was a really solid beat and raise. x.comÂ
Adobe is among the SaaS companies at risk because AI agents don't care about UX/UI, and SaaS businesses that rely on their interfaces are toast. Some were top SaaS names in 2021, before the ZIRP-era SaaS collapse. x.com x.comÂ
