Cory Doctorow
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So if you can imagine two companies, each of which turns over a million dollars this year, but one of which is expected to double in size next year, you could see why shares in that company that's doubling in size would be worth more than the shares in the company that are static.
And when your shares enjoy what's called this high price to earnings ratio, when they're valued this highly, they become extremely liquid.
And you can use them in place of cash.
And the advantage of shares over dollars is that shares are an endogenous product.
They're made within the four walls of the company through the simple expedient of typing zeros into spreadsheets.
And the corollary of this is that when you stop growing, when you become mature, which
has to happen eventually.
If you're Google with a 90 percent search market share, you're not going to grow your search market share anymore.
When you cap out your growth, your company becomes grossly overvalued because it's been valued as a growth company, but now it's a mature company,
And at that point, you see these panic sell-offs.
This is why every time tech companies announce very small slowdowns in their growth or reversals, you get these mass sell-offs.
You know, Facebook had a $240 billion one-day sell-off in the first quarter of 2022 after announcing it had slightly fewer American sign-ups than they'd anticipated.
It was the largest decapitalization of any firm in the history of markets until it happened again to NVIDIA a couple of years later, this time to the tune of three quarters of a trillion dollars.
But if you can't grow, well, the next best thing is to promise you're going to grow.
to say, well, look, we're about to conquer a new imaginary market in NFTs or Web3, or now that AI is getting a little stale, it's superintelligence.
And all of these things benefit in part from having technical meanings that aren't well understood or even well defined.
So you can
claim that you're going to conquer a market that no one else understands, which means when they say that that market isn't worth what you say it is, you can riposte by saying, nah, I'm the only person in the world who even knows what this market is.
So how can you tell me it's not as big as I claim it's going to be?
Oh, it's extremely precarious.
Showing 21–40 of 115 · page 2 of 6
← Previous
Next →