AFAIK since incomes are stagnant, tax revenue is very dependent on capital gains. Governments and central banks can't afford to let the stock and real estate bubbles pop.
Governments need taxes to a) keep the circus going and b) paying interests on the growing debt (a good chunk of it is held by the central bank).
Good luck with that. No one has been able to do it for decades on unclaimed land like Sealand or Liberland. And you want to essentially annex another country's territory by force and be recognized? That's pure fantasy.
That's not an argument made in good faith. You call the collapse of the USSR into Russia a "new country"? How many of these so called "new" countries are just single billionaires annexing some island they bought and being recognized by international institutions? I'll tell you how many: exactly zero. Total fantasy.
Ok let's take a step back. Get a .int domain by doing something scientific. Build CERN 2.0 on your new land and you're going to be very welcomed by other countries. It should only cost 8-9B for that and then this step is complete.
There are lots of countries smaller and/or poorer than Sweden.
There are a number of very small countries with GDPs in the hundreds of millions of USD range. If you could buy a country for say 10× GDP you are looking at the low billions in GDP which is Bhutan or Zanzibar sized economies.
The problem is that countries are not often openly up for sale. You need military or political backing to actually get one. So you cannot literally buy a country.
On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to say that this amount of money is the value of an entire small economy, or of the entire stock market of a somewhat bigger one.
>On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to say that this amount of money is the value of an entire small economy, or of the entire stock market of a somewhat bigger one.
Yes. I think it's plausible to believe that it's a ridiculous valuation. That whatever the company has can be replicated for less money.
That's probably true for many companies, but seeing as Palo Alto Networks probably has some kind of software arm, it seems reasonable to expect that they'd actually have the capacity to get what they want for less.