In the short term stuff doesn't need to bring in revenue - if the belief that it might make a lot of money moves share prices that is good enough.

You don't even need to believe that yourself, you just need to believe that a sufficient number of other people will be fooled.

What bugs me about recent circular dealing along these lines is, it seems like sort of trick that can be used to steal from people holding indexes. If companies like Nvidia and Oracle go up as a result of circular deals that are not creating "real" value - that nonetheless causes index funds (i.e, people's retirement accounts) to buy more of them.