Basically it's getting a huge benefit with no actual work behind it.
You know, I notice that the people who say this never, if it's so easy, do it themselves.
You can't pull a WeWork unless you're already a millionaire (though it's better to be a billionaire to be safe). The way you make money off of an overhyped IPO or Initial
Public Offering, is by getting in on the stock before the IPO launches. That is, by becoming a
private investor first.
It's a lot harder to invest privately than publicly. Private investment requires you to organize meetings with company owners directly, and those guys will only give you the time of day if you promise to shell out a lot for them (hence the millionaire requirement). Even if you do have a lot of money, you're still competing with other 0.1 percenters who have the exact same idea you do, but possibly even deeper pockets. There's only so much stock you can sell before you lose control of your company so this limited supply is going to go to the highest bidder. The 1% of the 0.1%.
So long story short, the reason why everyone isn't doing this is because only a few people have enough money. Further complicating things is that hyping a stock and its eventual IPO is genuinely difficult. I never said that it was easy. The bullshiters selling this snake oil have genuine talent, but when you do this for a decade it becomes easy for
you, though that applies to anything you devote enough practice to.
The real problem is that selling bullshit is more profitable than investing in successful businesses. Finding the next Steve jobs requires finding an exceptional individual who both has a revolutionary idea, and enough business sense to actually capitalize on it. The first part is already pretty tricky, but combined with the second makes it a search for a needle in a haystack. It's much easier to find a charismatic narcissistic or con-man who thinks he's the shit, and then give him a platform to preach his well-articulated message to the gullible masses. From a distance, they look like the same thing. I mean Steve Jobs was both the former and the latter!
It's the honest businesses that suffer the most from this. Smaller ideas with more realistic profit margins are shoved to wayside as the venture capitalists instead try to get into the next big thing. Money that could have been spent on companies that create products that improve our lives instead goes into companies that suck up the public's money and then vanish into thin air within a couple of years.
We live in very interesting times.
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Topic: The small random questions thread [WAAAAAAAAAAluigi] (Read 686933 times)