I just watched a video on Apple’s “cash problem”, with one of the video creators core point that “people expect the stock price to go up, and that can’t happen unless Apple does something with that cash and makes more with it!”.

Got me thinking: isn’t one of the core premises of investing that you’re purchasing ownership of cash flow? Is the ideal company one that it’s never profitable because it so perfectly allocated its money to never return a dime, but always to reinvest in itself? There’s a time and a place for re investment, but returning profit to investors is marginalized these days.

Apple probably doesn’t have a money problem, the culture does. Startups don’t sell growth except secondarily, they sell profit.