Do companies like Uber, Tesla, etc ever intend to pay dividends? If a stock never intends to pay dividends, the value of the stock is simply the price the next shumck is willing to pay.
The value of the stock is your share in the underlying business. Because underlying business changes over time (hopefully for the better) you are not simply hoping another shmuck pays you more, like with tulips, whose underlying value does not change with time. You own a portion of a concern that is improving its own fortunes.
Furthermore, dividends are approved by the board once per quarter or once per year. A dividend on a stock is not a contractual guarantee like it is on a bond. Therefore, it cannot be a basis of value.
With your logic, Berkshire Hathaway is a long-running greater-fool tulip bubble whose shares are only bidded up by finding more shmucks.
Well, the value of the stock for people who essentially do not have any meaningful control of the business must essentially be tied to the expectation of some liquidity event down the line -- future cash flows. So this could come in the form of dividends, sale of the stock, bankruptcy proceedings, or a purchase of the business.
If I knew for certain (big if) that a business would never have a liquidity event and I couldn't transfer my ownership then it's dead capital for all intents and purposes and you could consider its value essentially $0, right?
And you can sell your tulip. But if the mania stopped and you suddenly _couldn’t_ find another person to sell it to, would you now be upset you paid $5000 for a tulip? What’s the value at which you wouldn’t be upset? Ok, that’s the intrinsic value of a tulip to you.
The thing about a profitable business that is different from a tulip is that it can at any point decide to issue a one-time or ongoing dividend. It can sell off parts to create cash. It has lots of optionality. Public companies have even more liquidity, which creates more optionality.
Even if you don't have immediate liquidity, it would obviously be worth something to have a slice of e.g. Rolex SA. That's obviously different than owning a tulip.
Things don't have any inherent value. It is priced at a level that a buyer thinks it is worth.
A gallon of oil can be $3 or $6 depending on whether someone is willing to pay. It can also be $10 but only if people are willing to buy it at $10 if not "prices will come down to match the demand" - another way of saying it would be $9..$8...$7...$6 until it matches a buyer at which point gas is $6.
This is what I am trying to express. There is no "inherent price" or "inherent value" there is only the real value that it is bought at (in terms of money). There can be other values (non money) like if someone is willing to swap something for it etc.
There is no underlying value. It is only how much other people are willing to exchange for it.
So stock marked is always meaningless except considering it is so large and consequanetial and so many people have access to it that it will be rational automagically. This is more of a belief that seems to be fairly correct than a rational line of thinking. This is similar to Democracy in a way
You seem to be operating on the assumption that stock values are just totally and completely random and the fact that Google is worth $4T is just as much of a possibility as Hertz Rental Car being worth $1.5B
If you disagree with the above framing, your reasoning will have to concede the existence of underlying value. Yes, obviously the price of a share is the result of the bid and the ask price in the order book. But those prices are based on something, they are not randomly generated. They are based on conceptions of value. The fact that companies with increasing free cash flow over long periods of time always see increasing share prices over time is not random coincidence.
That example is a bit extreme but I can give two more normal examples.
Google/Nvidia and Apple/Nvidia. I don't think there is a world where nvidia will make more money than google or apple or keep making more money than them.
Also another one is Tesla. In my opinion, there is absolutely no world where tesla is worth the current stock price if you compare it to chineese companies or some company like Toyota.
Ofc at this point it depends on if you believe the stock market is absolutely correct or if it is correct in these specific examples. We can agree that it is correct in pricing Google higher than a car rental company but it is more complicated.
The prices are based on something but that something is so obscure and complicated that I don't see a way to make a calculation out of it outside of American ideology of stock market/capitalism.
> The fact that companies with increasing free cash flow over long periods of time always see increasing share prices over time is not random coincidence
This is just trivially related imo there is no real calculation between these things . And this relation it is breaking more and more lately as far as I can understand. This might mean stock market ideology is starting to diverge from the real world which is scary
The price of a growing business should go up because it has more options to create returns for shareholders.
Use Aldi (revenue ~$120B) as an example. Do you think a person would be a shmuck to buy a slice of it now versus when revenue was $1 million? If not, why not? Your answer will help understand why stock has value even without voting control or dividends.
That’s the story, but it’s bullshit. The underlying intrinsic value of a stock can only be materialized if the company liquidates and you receive a share of the sell off of its assets. How many publicly traded companies abruptly decide they’re tired of the business, stop in their tracks, and liquidate their assets? This only really happens if the company is acquired or if it goes bankrupt. Acquisition is the closest the story comes to truth, but it’s also just forced sale to a greater shmuck. If a company goes bankrupt, a tiny fraction of the current stock price would be realized into cash for common investors because of all the privileged investors and lenders ahead of them, not to mention that the actual value of capital assets etc probably doesn’t cover all the losses (the company’s going bankrupt after all). The value of the underlying capital assets are essentially never returned to the common investors, and the idea that you own a portion of them is in practical terms a lie.
> The underlying intrinsic value of a stock can only be materialized if the company liquidates and you receive a share of the sell off of its assets.
This is wildly incorrect. A profitable company can decide to begin paying out dividends, which can eventually return > 100% of the investor's purchase price. A company can issue more stock or bonds to raise cash to pay investors. A company can spin off assets to raise cash to pay investors.
Your framing is very much like a short-term PE investor, and if you look to their playbooks you can see there are many ways for intrinsic value to be realized while leaving an operating business behind. There are any number of stories where PE investors make big profits and then turn around and resell the company for more than they paid.
Yes, the profits it pays out are the one thing that actually makes sense, but the premise of the grandparent post was to ask what a share is worth _without_ dividends. And the answer is that shares are intrinsically worth very little. Liquidation value (actual liquidation - bankruptcy or going out of business or an exchange closure) is rarely ever practically realized for common investors. Even if you’re trading on the discounted expectation of a larger liquidation pie, nearly 0% is still nearly 0%.
Voting rights are also not valuable by themselves - they are only useful to steer the company towards greater future payouts, which means you are appealing to some other entitlement to value.
If you zoom out, a company is a temporary arrangement of people and things that makes more money than it spends _over time_. They are not really designed to accumulate and store value in and of themselves. The machines the employees use to do the work is a small fraction of the overall utility of a living breathing business. The valuable part is the capacity of this techno-social organism to reliably and continuously make profit, which is far greater than the sum of its parts. So if the profit that’s being earned is never paid out to stakeholders, then there’s no point in being a stakeholder. If the profit is redirected to make the organism bigger, then you are trading now-dollars for future-dollars which must be appropriately discounted. If everyone expects a company to do this forever, then the correct price is what the expected liquidation share should be, and that number is basically zero.
Yet, stocks that do not pay dividends exist at high valuations. What that tells you is that modern day stock trading is tulips: the lion’s share of the value derives from a temporarily stable, shared, _correct_ perception that someone else will buy it back from you.
The reality is that general investors are the greater fools in this arrangement. The prevalence of preferred stock is a tell that there are owners and there are “owners”. What we should do is recognize this and admit that the big initial investors and employees themselves are the owners, because they are the group small enough to actually realize liquidation value (should it ever be necessary). The public investors have no realistic claim on that value, so their shares should be more clearly labeled as dividend rights, which would cause them to be priced as such.
Excellent question. They may not intend, today, to pay dividends. However, the same question could have been asked about the successful tech companies of the '00s. Companies don't like to start paying dividends until they are fairly certain of their future profit stream and therefore ability to continue paying (and increasing) the dividends in the future.
Apple, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, Alphabet, Meta, Salesforce, and Qualcomm all pay dividends now. It's not unreasonable to expect Uber and Tesla to pay in the future. However, the median time after IPO for similar companies to pay a dividend is close to 20 years. So we could expect Uber to perhaps wfstart paying sometime around 2039. Tesla...is Tesla so who knows?
There are lots of US companies that pay dividends. Another commentor lists some tech companies that do, and there are lots of other types of businesses that do. A quick internet search will give you a list.
You are correct that stock buybacks are another way that companies reward their shareholders.
A big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion.
The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.
Like with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages.
From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?
ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.
As a Stripe customer I can attest to its simplicity: you have API that you call and that's it. You don't have to deal with any of the PCI stuff if you would do it in-house, just an SAQ once a year.
The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.
Having built on Authorize.net and a few other gateways before Stripe, I'd say yes - but the value that justifies the rake isn't the nicer API, it's what you no longer have to own. The moment you're paying out to third parties you're on the hook for KYC, identity verification, and the whole compliance/risk surface around moving other people's money. Connect absorbs that. Handing those pieces off so I stay compliant on payouts and can actually focus on the business is worth far more to me than the basis points. With other gateways I was assembling all of that myself.
Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.
Absolutely. Audio extraction, format conversion, loudness normalization are all there. If you have a specific TTS pipeline in mind the raw FFmpeg mode should handle most of it.
Maybe they are hedging against a future where local models are just as good as cloud models? Or maybe they can go the Taalas route and start hardcoding Gemma on a chip and hardware manufacturers can use it for local private AI.
Sellers of Shopify are more like sellers on Amazon than they know. Shopify controls what you can sell, what apps you can use, so is it really software for your business or you’re just a cog in its machine to become the next Amazon. I’ve seen so many DTC brands switch to Medusa and Woocommerce with a custom storefront.
In what ways? I'm sure there are businesses they refuse to support (like any company) but I have a family member running a Shopify store (selling things that you couldn't over Amazon due to logistics) and Shopify
- Doesn't have any pre approval process for products. We can add and edit products instantaneously with no process involving anyone else.
- Has never appeared to care, even when "products" are things like "we agreed on a delivery method over the phone".
I'd also point out that the store owns the brand with Shopify. We could switch out the backend for a different ones and the users wouldn't really notice. You couldn't do the same with Amazon.
Try selling used Apple products which you can on any website or marketplace online, except Apple will contact Shopify and they will unpublish products without even telling you.
You used to be able to install custom Shopify apps on your own store, now they make you jump through hoops. Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store. Had a friend trying to vibecode a custom Shopify app so he could replace one from the App Store that was running him $250/m. It was so confusing that he just gave up. I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Try selling Vape products or adult products and you’ll see you don’t really control the software. Selling used Apple products, vapes, and adult products is completely legal. Yes Stripe and PayPal can stop you from accepting payments for those products. But why is my business software doing the same?
Shopify not being willing to fight battles to keep supporting stores that other people don't want them to isn't exactly the same as them choosing what you can sell... Though I guess I see some similarity.
> I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Well if you want an argument in favor between terrible support, glitchy software, huge price hikes, and so on we aren't particularly happy with Shopify either...
> Shopify not being willing to fight battles to keep supporting stores that other people don't want them to isn't exactly the same as them choosing what you can sell...
Even if you have your own stack for software, you still need someone for payments, and that's where it hits you.
Shopify was letting Kanye sells nazi merch, they don't give a crap for most things unless it's trademark issues.
Opensource is the only way to free sellers from propeitary SaaS and marketplace middlemen. I’m actually working on building an opensource Shopify for every vertical from restaurants to gyms to hotels.
There’s an adapter system and we have Stripe and PayPal adapters but some users have created one for Solana Pay and Coinbase. Essentially it’s up to the seller what payments they want to support. Create the adapter functions once and you’re good.
Indeed it's worse, and apparently Valve/Steam is the only one who seems to care about something resembling freedom to sell legal things, even if we might subjectively disagree.
> Had a friend trying to vibecode a custom Shopify app so he could replace one from the App Store that was running him $250/m. It was so confusing that he just gave up.
He can vibecode a full Shopify app but not a bash script that uploads it to his Partner Dashboard? I'll admit it's difficult to distribute custom apps widely, but for internal use it's like one TOML file, 3 lines of bash then copy-pasting a link.
> Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store.
On the flip side, like Apple, is that they have a customer base that is actually happy to pay for apps.
Shopify runs a payment network called Shop Pay, and that network has relationships with the credit card companies like Visa. Honestly how do you expect to transact in goods that almost nobody will do business in? Even if you have the listing, what supported Shopify payment system will do the business?
Yes I know about Shop Pay (it’s a wrapper around Stripe). And just like Stripe and PayPal, Shop Pay gives Shopify the right to stop users from selling certain products.
I’m talking about connecting Shopify to authorize.net (credit card gateway) and a custom high risk processor. In that case, we are not using Shop Pay. But Shopify can still unpublish and restrict what you sell. That’s the issue. No one is saying Shopify has to allow sellers to sell high risk items under Shop Pay. It’s when you connect to a different payment processor.
As long as you get a high risk payment processor, you can sell these products in the US. But even when you connect this high risk processor to Shopify, they can still stop you from selling certain products. Payment processors are supposed to handle that and if my payment processor is ok with it, who made Shopify the judge, jury, executioner? Why is a software that manages my product catalog and orders deciding what I can sell? If I'm selling something illegal, my payment processor will handle it or the wronged company can sue me. Shopify shouldn't be deciding this.
I mean take a look at how peptides are exploding. It's legal to sell them for research purposes, but you can't on Shopify. Unless you are on Plus and have an account manager and go thru backchannels. Literally Shopify picking winners instead of letting the market do it's job.
That is the assumption Shopify is just software, but it is not. It is a service. And I don't see why a service can't have a choice to choose which customer it wants to serve. Especially in a market with plenty of options.
During Covid we were selling medical PPE on Shopify and they shut us down, along with lots of other people. We weren't price gouging or doing anything shady either.
Instead we setup our own site and were quickly getting large orders for 1 million+ masks per week from big box stores and hospital groups.
Sorry but as someone who has a Shopify store and also sells via Amazon - you are dead wrong.
I have much more freedom with Shopify, it's not even comparable. It's not even apples to oranges, it's apples to calculators.
Amazon places a lot more restrictions on everything, from products, product descriptions, images, it's quite difficult to list original products on Amazon (took me 2 weeks of work to register our product backlog when I started selling via Amazon, despite having GTINs and everything already in place). Cashflow etc is not comparable in ANY way.
Just wanted to call out a blatantly wrong comment.
Yep, as a former shopify seller, this read like someone who had no clue and no basis in reality.
And yes i have a lot of criticisms of shopify, but for the most part on the product side you can do whatever you want if the payment platforms accept it, this is very different than amazon.
Depends on what you sell. We were in electronic recycling selling everything from Xeon processors and server ram to used iPhones and MacBooks on Amazon. Easy to sell and list, no issues.
Then we realized we weren’t really building a brand on Amazon so we started a Shopify store. Listed the same products and one day just unpublished. Messaged Shopify and they said we can’t sell used Apple products. Send them our Amazon and eBay stores with thousands of sales. Didn’t care. I brought in a payment processor myself, still unpublished. I just built my own Shopify alternative at that point.
In the end, you’re selling products that Shopify deems ok so you’re not going to face these issues. Do you really think Shopify doesn’t have issues just cause you don’t face them?
I am admittedly not an expert here but this does not at all sound like something that Apple can force Shopify to do. I was under the impression that when Apple does something like this it's primarily because the seller was positioning themselves as an official Apple reseller in some way which they do pretty aggressively police. Did Shopify give you any more details on why they believed they had to delist you?
Because we were in electronic recycling, many items came without batteries or chargers due to fire-risk concerns, so we had to source replacements ourselves. We eventually launched a private-label brand for generic camera batteries, drone batteries, power-tool batteries, chargers, and similar accessories.
Then Shopify unpublished those products too after Canon contacted them, claiming we were not allowed to sell them. But these were generic replacement products, the same kind of items sold by Anker and countless other electronics brands online.
If Canon believed we were doing something illegal, they could have sent a cease-and-desist and gone through the normal legal process. Instead, they went through Shopify’s back channels and effectively skirted due process, using platform pressure to remove products they simply did not want us selling.
But don’t worry, companies like Anker who have resources and pull can still sell them and have online websites. Again, the market is being manipulated and winners chosen.
Or were you doing something shady that was legitimate grounds for Shopify to remove those products? There's a big difference between what you personally think should be appropriate and what laws and compliance requirements consider. It's like the annual HN post about someone that claims Cloudflare shut down their account and eventually it turns out they were clearly doing something against the TOS.
Nope we’re electronic recyclers and work with real certified Apple refurbished sellers across the US. Let me know if you find any Shopify stores selling refurbished MacBooks like we and many other sell on Amazon and eBay legally. Same with generic batteries and chargers.
We ditched Shopify years ago and sell the same things on our Shopify alternative. Host on Railway and haven’t faced issues in more than 5 years, no need for a high risk payment processor either.
Yes, first I built Openship, an order management system, that worked with Shopify. Then it was easy to move off Shopify and build my own alternative. Any e-commerce seller knows all you need is an OMS. I also built a custom storefront so that was easy to migrate.
Are those sellers on Shop.app established? Try launching your own and get back to me. Apple will be on Shopify trying to shut you down immediately. Just like so many websites on the web, it’s hard to make accounts now and that’s the same with e-commerce. Shopify is essentially choosing winners based on who they allow to sell what.
But can really say any of their products are top of their respective niches? Windows, Xbox, Azure are not the gold standard. They had the lead or close to it in these niches but floundered that.
I never understand these takes like they did this much in revenue. OP acknowledges that, they have enterprise down and are too big to fail. What’s to say they couldn’t be doing more revenue? Or even better year over year if they played their cards right. Don’t get me started on GitHub and VSCode. Popular projects are leaving GitHub and VSCode wasn’t able to monetize itself where many forks were able to do so.
If Windows isn't the gold standard having 70% of the market, then what is? Azure is in second place not by far after AWS. And these are huge, HUGE markets. I wouldn't say your local grocer is dead because it's not Costco, and of course by this logic Costco is itself dead because it's not Walmart.
Maybe we are jumping the gun on Windows. My echo chamber is tech people and they seemed to have lost faith in windows after they Windows 11 introduced ads and plugged every hole that allowed to bypass needing a Microsoft account. Gaming and anti-cheat not working on Linux will keep that market share high for a while.
Wasn’t there work being done where a model could remove irrelevant context? Maybe these complex search scripts can help the model get the revenant files and then it can remove it.
Interesting read, the part about being able to walk in with a gift card less than $10 in California and getting cash due to the law is nice, but you pointing out how these class action cards don’t count as those is pitiful.
So are you charging the card to pay for your own e-commerce item? I thought using Stripe to pay yourself was a big no-no. I know you could always put a different name and it’s a card that’s not linked to you per se, but don’t risk a Stripe ban for this. They don’t care about “technicality,” if they get a sniff, they will ban.
Great analysis and follows my experience as well. Codex is better when you know how you want the design and the architecture and you drive the agent a lot more aggressively. Claude Code feels like more autopilot so executives and users who didn’t code before AI like it a lot more.
But I feel like an expert who can drive GPT aggressively will out perform Opus. It’s why some smart people I know are opting for GPT and have fallen off on Opus. It’s like asking an F1 driver to sit in a taxi.
Opus 4.7 (haven't tried 4.8) just really struggles writing correct code for complicated (i.e. valuable) work. I can handle architecture, which takes <1% of my time anyway. But writing code that's wrong is a cardinal sin. I've had much more luck with GPT 5.5 so far.
This is exactly right. Claude has baked in autonomy and preferences that let it handle underspecified prompts elegantly, which makes it seem smarter to people who like to prompt that way, but it also ignores instructions and fights you on things, which makes it a bad model for people who know what they want to do and specify it.
I’m using Hermes Agent and this MCP to orchestrate 5 models (DS4 Flash, GPT 5.5, Opus 4.8, Grok Build, Gemini 3.5 Flash). Basically these 5 models are making mock trades every day and keeping track of their potential losses and profit. Hermes keeps them going and making trades throughout the day.
After a month, I’m going to check their mock trading sheet and see which one was the most “profitable” and then give that agent $500/day to make trades.
Yes but there’s many reports of agents getting back testing to work but it never translates to real trading. It seems they tend to overfit to back testing so I’m just giving them access to Twitter sentiment, other trading data thru tools and not necessarily an algo that’s been back tested. It’s why the flash models are doing better image they have faster tps and can call the tools faster.
>they have faster tps and can call the tools faster.
This is like going to war with the HFT firms armed only with a stalk of celery ("it's much pointier than the tomatoes, even though those are more expensive").
Flash vs non-flash models are more about letting me know if model intelligence or model speed (with powerful tools/MCPs) are better for trading. I’m not telling the model to be fast as possible because HFT firms are already arbitraging those mini seconds to make pennies.
Alas, many financial models do well in backtests and then fail in the real world. You have to expose them to all kinds of market conditions and not just the recent one. Good luck out there!
Yes even before AI, backtesting was a crapshoot. But AI adds another crease because it might have knowledge in its training. If you’re training an LLM model on backtesting, it might know that Apple crushed a certain quarter and knowing that, it buys shares before that Q earnings.
reply