You can tell that he doesn’t really think too deeply about any of this, because the way he wants to illustrate the point is by typing the numbers into a calculator.

It’s as if the money comes right up out of thin air, isn’t it?

He inadvertently gets close when he talks about Facebook being about people doing stalking. PG, is stalking a good thing or a bad thing, hmmm?

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skybrian 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There’s no conservation rule for an asset’s value. Market cap comes mostly out of thin air because people believe a company is valuable. If they change their minds, it disappears.

(Market cap is estimated based on transactions that are a small percentage of market cap.)

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mlsu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, market cap does not come out of thin air. Money flows in one direction and human activity and real changes in the physical world flow in the other direction.

Nobody is mad about the billionaires having a lot of money - they are mad that people are pissing in water bottles to make their route, or having the city’s public infrastructure privatized, or the many other fantastic real world changes that are on the other side of these fantastical market caps.

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skybrian 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Market cap is based on people making estimates of future cash flow. (Especially for growth companies.) Predictions aren’t physical and can be wrong.

It’s also true that these companies raise and spend money and that results in physical changes in the world, but angry people on the Internet aren’t necessarily well-informed about what those changes are. There are lots of myths.

	▲	mlsu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Your argument here is either - the money is fake, because it's based on a future prediction that is eventually going to be wrong; or it is "what billionaires are doing is fine, actually." The first one is dispensed quite easily: if a person becomes a billionaire by lying about what will happen in the future, then the "wealth" is fake and obviously not earned. That second one is very straightforward and can be addressed. You have to ignore a lot of obvious evidence to believe that coinbase, opensea, flock safety, one of the many gig startups... (to use a few of PGs billionaires) are a net positive force on society. Thanks for educating me on the meaning of a valuation, but it's not really needed. Those "future cash flows" are eventually realized, and the first category converts into the second (in most cases). You have to understand that when people are upset, they are upset about real changes that they see in their lives. They see the world that bezos, musk, peter thiel, etc are building, and they hate it. And yes, this group of people includes PG.

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Alpha3031 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Traditionally, the value of a security is a prediction of its future cashflow to perpetuity discounted by a capitalisation rate. While it is true that some securities these days are sold as something not dependent on future cash flows, and insiders are paid off by selling something misleading to retail investors, that is known as a Ponzi scheme and is traditionally prohibited by securities regulations.

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skybrian 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Predictions aren’t physical and can be wrong.

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Alpha3031 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There is nothing physical about any financial transaction (except some electrons moving I guess), that doesn't mean that they aren't supposed to approximate something that happens in physical reality. A billion dollars is control.

	▲	skybrian 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the transactions are real, but trades are based on speculation and market cap is an extrapolation of much smaller trades. The transactions are just as real for Bitcoin or a meme stock.