Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Google Needs More Money

Google

You could tell a stylized story of the stock market in three phases. Historically, the point of the stock market was to raise money for companies to do stuff. You wanted to start a railroad, you needed money to build tracks, so you went out and sold stock to investors to raise the money. People bought stock to fund companies, and when the companies did well, they were able to pay nice dividends to their investors.

The stock market of the 21st century is different, in at least three ways:

1. A lot of the biggest and most successful modern companies ...