I understand your question, but at the end of the day, what is value? Why is a one can of soup more collectible than another physically identical can of soup beyond 'intangible' knowledge of it having been owned by a historical figure? In practical sense, things are worth only as much as someone is willing to pay, and someone is willing to pay 2.5m.
Sure, it's all on a sliding scale, but I think GP's point is the lines are blurring into insanity. At least a can of soup is a tangible object and is more "realizable" to our beings than some information stored on a database in some FAANG datacenter. Depending on your perspective it's all ridiculous or all rational, but at least the can of soup can be interacted with "natively" by our bodies without needing a trillion dollar technology stack to even sense in the first place.
It may give you some theoretical infinitesimal ownership of the company.
But since Alphabet doesn't pay dividends, there is zero cash flow.
And it doesn't even give you the right to vote.
There's no scenario where you can convert your share into physical assets of the company, or claim any portion of the future cash flows of the company.
And unlike NFTs, a share of GOOG isn't even rare. There are 330 million others identical to yours.
A share of GOOG is just an entry in an electronic ledger, and literally the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else.
And yet people happily pay $2,100 for one, with no other objective than to resell it to someone else for more.
"FAANG datacenter" really highlights the absurdity of including Netflix in the acronym - they have no data centers of their own, as they're built entirely on the AWS stack.
Based on my reading of the "12 million dollars stuffed shark"¹, this has the same mechanics as the market of a piece of contemporary art (I'd go as far as considering that this is, essentially, an art piece).
In such markets, pieces are status, which has nothing really to do with matter (in a physical sense). Specifically:
- status is sold; Jack Dorsey is famous, and his first tweet is strongly symbolic;
- status is acquired/purchased; the buyer has the money for the purchase, and he'll fits the item likely in a sort of private collection.
The status interpretation can make more intuitive the nature of the transaction/item, dispelling the insanity interpretation.
It needs to be considered also that this can be very conventional speculation; in this sense, it would appear intuitively "not insane", like financial instruments (of course, in another sense, they are fundamentally insane :)).
I highly doubt Jack is doing this, but it seems like another good vehicle for money laundering. Here's an essentially worthless tweet I set at an unreasonable value as an NFT or whatever.
Maybe he's doing a proof-of-concept for something else Twitter is developing (almost infinitely more likely than Jack doing money laundering), but this stuff just seems weird for rich tech people to do. This is like certificates of authenticity for random infomercial products, just on the blockchain.
