Finance professor Aswath Damodaran praised Amazon's relentless evolution, warned Meta's growth phase is over, and touted Microsoft's gaming deal at a recent event. Here are the 12 best quotes.

• Aswath Damodaran praised Apple's prudence with its cash and Amazon's constant evolution.
• The finance professor dismissed Facebook's name change, and said the company's growth stage is over.

Aswath Damodaran praised Amazon's constant evolution, warned Facebook's growth phase is behind it, and lauded Microsoft's proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard during the Pivot MIA conference in February.

The finance professor at NYU Stern School of Business — whose nickname is the "Dean of Valuation" — also cheered Apple's prudent spending, predicted GE's demise, and questioned Disney's huge investments in its Disney Plus streaming platform. His comments were broadcast on a recent episode of the Pivot podcast.

Here are Damodaran's 12 best quotes from the conference:

1. "The CFO of a young start-up might as well be the janitor. You're the guy that everybody ignores and walks by — because really, what are you going to do? You're not going to make this company great again." (Damodaran noted that CFOs add value later in a company's life cycle, when its investments become less lucrative and it wants to lower its cost of capital.)

2. "Amazon is a company I've valued every year since 1997. Talk about a book that never ends, right? Each time you think you're getting to the final chapter, they figure out a way to continue. It's like a sequel on top of a sequel, on top of a sequel. It's like 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Part 55' and Johnny Depp is still alive, and he's still drunk, and he's still doing all the things he did."

3. "Amazon has one advantage over every other company in the world: Patience is built into its DNA. I've told people who are competing with it, 'I don't know whether Amazon will ever make money, but the one thing I can guarantee is you will never make money.' It's almost a given that they will bring down the business margins by the time they're done."

4. "The only thing that brings down Godzilla is King Kong, and Facebook met a King Kong big enough to bring them down. At this point, it's clear they're not a growth company. Anybody who invests in Facebook thinking 20% growth is coming back is barking up the wrong tree." (Damodaran noted Apple's rollout of new privacy settings on its devices caused Facebook-owner Meta's recent slowdown in user growth.)

5. "There's no good reason for a company to change its name, right? Unless you're going into witness protection. When Phillip Morris renamed itself Altria and said, 'We're known to be toxic,' guess what? You still sell cigarettes. It's not going to go away." (Damodaran was commenting on Facebook changing its name to Meta.)

6. "It's like Alphabet. Google wanted to make it look like they're a multi-business company. The reality is the search box is what drives the business. It's like 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' right? You've got the search box that delivers all this stuff. And you've got the seven dwarves who eat up your cash flows and earnings. I still call them Google until I actually see the rest paying off."

7. "When Walmart bought Flipcart about five years ago for $21 billion, I called it the most expensive facelift in history. Because let's face it, Walmart is an old company. They want to be young again. Why? Because they're competing against a company that seems to have found the fountain of everlasting youth. (Damodaran was referring to Amazon as Walmart's ageless rival.)

8. "Think about how much cash they've had for the last decade, and all the suggestions that people give: 'Buy Tesla, buy Netflix.' The reality is Apple has so much cash, they can buy Greece, they can pretty much buy whoever they want. What has always impressed me about Apple is the discipline they've shown not to do any of those things. They're not in a hurry, they're not going out and buying things. Hopefully, time will be enough of an ally that they can find ways of replacing the iPhone franchise, the greatest cash cow in history."

9. "I'm usually not a fan of acquisitions, but I did like the Microsoft acquisition of Activision. What they're getting with Activision is not the games. For a $2 trillion company, what's the benefit of going after that market? It's small pickings. They have much bigger ambitions here. They're buying a platform. As they see it, their future competitors are not Nintendo and Sony; they're going to be Roblox and Facebook and the other players who can potentially come after them with gaming solutions."

10. "When I think of Netflix, I think of a hamster wheel. You make more content, you sign up more users. Then you go to the markets and say, 'Look how many more subscribers we have.' Then you go back, and create even more content."

11. "I am a little nervous about what Disney is doing with Disney Plus. It's playing the Netflix game. Next year, it expects to spend, what, $33 billion on content? It's skewing everything that Disney does as a company."

12. "This is a 'Walking Dead' company. It's a zombie company. The only stories you can tell are about how quickly the end will come, and how painful it's going to be. But it had a great run, 125 years. Don't shed any tears for GE."