[yetanotherphd]

It's extremely simple:

The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.).

In theory (and practice) the price of a stock is the expected value of the time-discounted sum of its future dividends.

So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends. Google do, after all, have to do something with all their money one day.

Voting is also not very important. In some cases it might be needed to keep the board/executives in line, but for an individual shareholder, the right to vote is of no importance.

[lutusp]

> The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.).

This omits the value of the share itself, as a commodity on the open market. If your claim were true, people would refuse to invest in shares that don't pay dividends.

The primary reason to invest in shares is that they they might grow along with the (a) market as a whole, and (b) the company that issued the shares. Dividends are frosting.

> So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends.

With all respect, do you really want to be pontificating about something you know nothing about? There are plenty of companies that don't pay dividends at all, never have, and yet have many loyal investors, for the best of reasons -- the company is growing along with the value of its stock. Instead of paying dividends, many companies put corporate profits directly back into company expenses, with the expectation that this will grow the company and its stock. And the investors agree.

[yetanotherphd]

You are correct about the empirical facts (there exist some companies don't currently pay dividends), but theory is needed to understand that if those company's never paid dividends, they would be worthless.

The fundamental principal is that of the transversality condition, also called the "no ponzi" condition, which states that assets must eventually deliver. If a company pays no dividends forever then the value of its stock is only based on what people are willing to pay in the future, forming a self-reinforcing ponzi-like system. It is generally assumed (I can think of many good reasons for this, like the finiteness of the universe) that such violations of the transversality condition don't occur.

Therefore the value of a share is the expected value of all future dividends. I suspect you also didn't read my post carefully and missed my qualification of "dividend-like" things. E.g. a company might start small, grow, stagnate and be bought by a private equity firm and split into parts that are sold off. At that point, the company has effectively delivered dividends to the private equity firm.

>With all respect, do you really want to be pontificating about something you know nothing about?

Your smugness is unwarranted and reflects badly on your character. I suggest you read some books on economics and try to be a better person.