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> Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock do

> Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new investors money coming in. This is just nonsense. The fact that GOOG doesn't pay dividends is not important or meaningful. Buying back shares is more tax efficient for shareholders. Google spent $30 billion on share buybacks in 2020, and authorized $50 billion for share buybacks in 2021. You don't have to trick a "greater fool" into buying your GOOG shares, Google will happily buy them from you with their giant free cash flow. This is just how tax-efficient companies return money to shareholders these days.

waprin 5y ago
> The fact that GOOG doesn't pay dividends is not important or meaningful. I actually agree with you here. The thing is, the fact that Bitcoin or Ethereum doesn't have "intrinsic value" is not important or meaningful either. Obviously GOOG is valuable and obviously BTC is valuable, and obviously ETH is valuable, but in both cases you can play semantic games to toss around economic terms like "greater fool theory", without understanding where the fundamental value actually emerges from, to pretend like they're worthless. If you actually follow the activity around Bitcoin and Ethereum, the idea that these coins are suddenly going to drop to $0 and nobody will want one is about as absurd as that happening to GOOG.