[philwelch]

My rebuttal is to note the notion of "expected value". A company that has a 1/1000 chance of becoming a trillion dollar company and a 999/1000 chance of becoming a worthless company is worth 1 billion dollars.

And that's the most simplified model possible. If you have a 1/1000 chance of being worth a trillion dollars, you may also have a 10/1000 chance of being worth ten billion dollars, 100/1000 chance of being worth one billion dollars, and 200/1000 chance of being worth 100 million dollars. That adds $220 million of expected value. You can add another couple million if you account for the company still having liquefiable assets even in the case that it ends up folding like Pets.com (which ended up returning at least a few million dollars to their shareholders: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161802...).