Companies doing stock buybacks to boost their share price (and executive pay), instead of re-investing the money into their business. As Ben Norton said, this is why Boeing is in such a fucked up place now. Price to earnings ratios that prices stocks at well beyond their worth. People invest more money to prop up the overvalued stock market, causing an even more unreasonable price. People look at 
, assume that it will always go that way, and keep dropping money into it.
Not to mention that so much of a company's "value" is symbolic shit like their trademark. For instance, Apple's logo is worth over $100 billion, Tesla's is somehow over $70 billion, even though the cars are fucking shit. So much of clothing is just a company slapping a label on the product and the storefront and calling it a day, while subcontracting everything in the design and production.
I'm tempted to put this in badposting, because this is not incredibly new or insightful.
had to change it to satisfy his adolescent obsession with a letter. Consequences be damned. And the billions lost in that endeavor? Forgettable. It's just more ones and zeroes in the banking cloud. More numbers on screens. So detached from tangible reality they are closer to videogame scores. Definitely adjacent to crypto. So I agree with your sentiment here.