Palantir could be the most overvalued company that ever existed

We should stop comparing incomparable things, like companies market cap (measured in dollars or pounds) to national GDPs (measured in dollars or pounds per year,) unless we want to reach outrageous but incorrect conclusions.

It's a dubious comparison but not because of "per year". The comparison is implicitly to one year's worth of GDP, which is a currency amount.

It's dubious because whereas a year's worth of GDP has some claim to actually being the value of something (with many caveats but it's engineered to behave like that as much as possible), market cap isn't. It's the amount all the shares would cost if someone bought them all in one go for the price some shares were most recently purchased for, which would never happen.

Well, based on that last share purchase, we have incontrovertible proof that there was indeed one person in history who thought it was worth 3x GPD.

And the fact that in the entire BSSTC shareholder universe, there wasn't any noticeable volume for a sell, or a registered sell limit, at a lower value leading up to the last peak.

That must have been a rough trade, but someone got something out at the last moment.

What’s the issue? If a market cap is three times an annual GDP, it means it would take three years of that economy’s entire production to purchase the company. It’s obviously a very fuzzy measure for various reasons, but it can give some idea of the market value of a company.

Er... happens all the time sir. Happened to me (Hashicorp shares)

Market cap being rediculous is the hallmark of a bubble.

How do people value companies (i.e. decide what the market cap should be)? Most often by comparing it to a corresponding per year number or two.

> “I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows”

- Michael Kalecki

A couple of points:

1. No, we don't have proof that there was one person who thought it was worth 3x GDP. We have proof that there was one person who thought a 0.001% share of the company was worth 0.003% of GDP or whatever. They could think it was worth that much for plenty of reasons; maybe they thought the share price would grow for a bit more before collapsing so that they could make some profit, maybe they invested in order to just be an investor and have a say in investor meetings or however things worked back then. Maybe it was a status thing.

2. Why are we using the opinion of one random person to determine the value of a company

To add to this, this type of thing happens all the time in crypto.

A coin will release 1/1000000000th of it's eventual supply, have some trades at 10c and then claim the value of the entire supply as the headline value.

It's obviously dumb.

Comparing stocks to Flo's is perfectly meaningful. It's often done when comparing, for instance, the price of a house to one's yearly salary.

Hashicorp was bought for $35 per share at a time when it was trading a little above $25. Not saying crazy market caps aren't a sign of a bubble (not sure how you'd read that in my comment), just that market cap is not the value of the company.

What simple method would you use instead? It is effective to have such comparisons for quick communication of the relative size of things.

It is effective but wrong. It is the same as to compare a river flow to dam volume. There is a relation, but does not mean anything.

A better comparison is to compare somebody's net value to the total housing value of a city. For instance comparing Musk's net value to the total value of all the houses/apartments in New York. Or the the value of the gold in Fort Knox.

That makes no sense. House price/salary is used to compare payment periods or affordability. The context is important. Share value and GDP are totally different things and there is no direct relationship.

Variation in price doesn't prove that the market cap is not (a good estimate of) the company value for highly liquid stocks.

Value is subjective. Stock prices measure peoples perception of the value. Your thesis that it is incorrect can only come from 2 places (I think)

1. Dumb money - the market cant see that XYZ is overvalued or undervalued. My rebutal there is nonetheless XYZ has been valued by a conpletely open continuous auction that people are not restricted to participate in.

2. The parts are less than their sum. This may be somewhat true... total control over a company may be more (or less) valuable than splitting. But I dont think it is order of magnitude. And if it is, it is because the value to you isnt the value to me (the value of RAM to a gamer < value of RAM to OpenAI).