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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.

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The value of a business is entirely the part the second of the line - its entirely people speculating on the future value. Thats why Telsa is worth so much compared to other auto makers - its a small, niche player who makes poor quality cars - but investors believe it will take over the world hence its 'valuation'.

This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.

>hedge funds would be worth nothing.

People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.

And you have to have a monopoly though? Farms provide the most value to the world but there's so much competition that it's commoditized, so as far as I know there's no super valuable farms... Hopefully the same thing happens with autonomous cars, cloud computing, etc.

The customer is often merely a product to be farmed like livestock for as much of their disposable income as can possibly done. The people who are provided value are usually the shareholders not the people who are using the product or service.

Both the business and the customer get value when the customer spends their income on something from the business.

If I charge you $100 for a glass of lemonade you get value too, but it is not a good value.

If it wasn't good value for me I wouldn't buy it from you.

Too bad. I bought out almost all the competing lemonade stands and the water company. If you want to drink you have to play my game. Oh and as for my competitors stands? They price them like mine because their shareholders expect the margins I achieve. You want to open a stand? My lemon companies won't sell to you. The city won't grant you a license to operate a stand.

I only drink water anyways. I won't buy yours or anyone else's then.

Do we still believe this propaganda? Really?

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