Comment by jonas21

You could just as easily ask yourself how can a middle man for people finding web pages be worth so much, but here we are, and Google is worth something like $4 trillion, mostly on the back of search.

As it turns out, it's very valuable to be the intermediary between a large number of people who want something and a commoditized market of providers. It's the middleman who captures most of the margin.

Now, AI models are not a commodity yet. But things seem like they might be heading that direction. And in a world where they are, Stripe probably wants to be that guy sitting in the middle.