PE is desperately competing other PE to get into the promise of some AI thingy NOW?

Just guessing. The frenzy around popular, good already, and successful services with the corporate crap flowing from this acquisition announcement too is appalling. The "what's best for you, the user" heavy emphasis when this would be inherently evident in any honest service forecasts the opposite.

Some highlights from one of my agents asked for a no bullshit evaluation:

"By buying OpenRouter, they own the routing layer that decides which model gets called and at what price."

"Stripe wants to be the economic infrastructure for AI — meaning they want to be the toll booth and the traffic cop for the entire AI economy."

"... insider market intelligence that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google don't fully have. Stripe would now have it."

"The $7B+ price is absurd on any financial metric, but this isn't a financial acquisition — it's a strategic positioning play to own the platform layer of the next computing paradigm."

"140x revenue multiple: At ~$50M revenue, this is not a financial valuation. It's a strategic land grab — buying the chokepoint before someone else does."

I do not feel a particularly strong smell of 'best for the user' here for some reason... More like the usual 'how do we squeeze out more for our PE folks from this' kind of scent.