This is a bit hazier when we focus on some more detailed points: when a stock pays out some amount of dividend, the price per share of the stock is adjusted dow

This is a bit hazier when we focus on some more detailed points: when a stock pays out some amount of dividend, the price per share of the stock is adjusted downwards by the same amount to reflect that cash has been lost from the company coffers; dividends are often inferior from a tax perspective to capital gains: some companies have a policy of not paying dividends at all! Due to tax disadvantages, many investors these days might prefer not to be paid dividends and prefer to receive gains as capital appreciation when they sell off some or all stock. Also, from a control perspective, a minority shareholder is nothing remotely like the same thing as the sole owner operator of a chicken farm. There's a trend in recent years where some stocks of large profitable companies do not pay dividends. Some of these stocks even have weird voting right structures that reduces the voting power of shares sold to public investors compared to founders, etc. These stocks are arguably worthless from a "buy a piece of the business and hold it forever" perspective of a minority investor: if the company policy is not to pay dividends, and you are a minority shareholder with no voting rights, the only reasonable foundation you have for a nonzero valuation of the share is that "maybe someone else will value it, and I can sell it to them at some future point in time". If you buy and hold you will receive no dividends and not be able to influence the decisions of the company. This situation is maybe easier to think about in the situation where you are a minority shareholder in a company, and there is a powerful majority shareholder who is not interested in the interests of minority shareholders, and may be able to use that control to extract profit from the business in a way that is not proportionally shared with minor share holders. In such situations the value of a share to a minority shareholder could be dramatically lower than in a different scenario with a different control structure.