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What if I say, "it's not worth $1T to me but I'm doing it for the memes"

Are you selling me just the apple?

Doesn't change anything. If you buy something for a certain price, regardless of whatever reasons you have for doing so (including but not limited to, being rich and irresponsible, being insane, or doing it for the memes.) Then that thing has that value to you at that point in time.

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."

If I deliberately ridiculously over pay for an item to create publicity then as the buyer it explicitly doesn't have that value to me. The value isn't in the item purchased.

I think your definition of value / worth should be based on the seller, not the buyer.

That’s fair, there are cases where the transaction itself has some worth to the buyer for reputational or other reasons, independent of the item being purchased. Those are rather unusual cases, but they happen.

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.

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