OpenAI is worth the discounted value of their future free cash flow. It's not clear at this point how much free cash flow they will ever generate, if any.
I could buy a local sweetshop for a 100 billion dollars, just because I might do that, that doesn't mean it's actually worth that.
I think the argument you’re really looking to contradict is this: if 1% of a company is worth $1B to somebody, then somebody would pay $100B for the whole company. That does not follow (and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”).
You are assuming that the money that I buy the sweet shop for is what I evaluate the value of the sweet shop to be worth. That's not necessarily true.
You're also assuming I'm not insane.
If I offer to buy an apple from you for 1 trillion dollars because I believe consuming that specific apple will make me a god, that apple is not actually worth 1 trillion dollars.
If I have an apple and you agree to buy it for $1T, then the apple is indeed worth $1T at that moment.
After the purchase is complete it is worth ~$0, or whatever the next person is willing to pay you for it.
Alternatively you can say “it is still worth $1T to me” and that would be true as well.
When we are specifically talking about companies, their value is where buyers meet sellers in the order book.
Are you selling me just the apple?
Whether someone else will share your judgment of its worth is highly unlikely, but it is also entirely irrelevant. Worth has never meant "objective value to literally everyone."
I think your definition of value / worth should be based on the seller, not the buyer.
There are contracts that involve exchanging $1 to satisfy some legal requirement of consideration, but the relationship created is worth much more than $1. And of course there are barter transactions where items are exchanged directly without any specific valuation in money involved at all.
The acquisition price is almost always significantly more than its market value. The reason is that if you start buying shares on the open market each transaction of yours will raise the stock price, and eventually you will price yourself out of the purchase.
So what buyers do is negotiate directly with the board and propose an inflated price that >50% of shareholders are okay with.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ferrar...
What else does worth mean?
I buy a sweetshop for 1 billion dollars.
Now, immediately after I have bought it, what's it worth?
I could have bought bike shop, or an apple.
That value wasn't associated with that specific item. It's an arbitrary choice.
The issue is that buying something for the memes isnt worth less, it's 'what you are actually buying'?.
If I arbitarily decide to buy an apple for $10 that I could have bought for $1, what did I actually buy with the $9.
Publicity? Goodwill?
I don't believe I only bought an apple, even from the person I bought it from.
Now he's been pursued by the press to comment, and he's the guy that sold that thing for $X for the rest of his life. I bought that from him too.
If I paid the market price, that doesn't happen.
So what did I really buy?
Is a buyer asking to buy it? If yes, whatever you sell it for.
If no, then you really have no idea what it's worth now, all you know is it was worth 1B to you when you bought it.
At the least OpenAI is worth what the market is willing to pay for it.