Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,714 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
are worth more than companies that are mature.
And the reason for that is that a share of a company is a claim on its future earnings.
And so if you have a company that makes a million dollars a year, and it's going to make a million dollars next year, and it's going to make a million dollars the year after that, you can see why that company, a share of its future earnings would be less than a company that made a million dollars this year, but might make 1.5 million next year, and 2 million the year after that, and 5 the year after that.
And the corollary is that when a company stops growing, it is grossly overvalued.
Because now it's mature.
And so what we see are these corrections whenever growth tapers off in these companies, where suddenly the stock market does these panicked sell-offs.
And so if you're an executive at one of these companies who've been compensated in shares,
Well, it's not because of ideology that you don't want the share to fall off a cliff.
It's because that's where all your money is.
And not only that, if you plan on growing by buying other companies with shares, you better hope you have a growth stock with highly liquid shares because companies will take those instead of cash.
Whereas if you want to buy a company for cash, you've got to get it from a creditor or a customer or an investor.
If you want to get more shares, you just type zeros into a spreadsheet.
It's an endogenous substance of the firm.
So you have this paradox.
When firms cap out their growth,
They have to act to build a narrative that investors will believe about how they will continue to grow.
They started by claiming they would absorb each other.
Facebook said we're going to become Google because we do the pivot to video and that's going to be YouTube.
Google said we're going to become Facebook because we have Google Plus and that's going to absorb Facebook.
The problem with that is that when you claim that you're about to become Facebook, there are a bunch of Facebook people who will say that you're not.
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