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And if all the businesses work that way, why ever invest? Owning 10% of a company that pays no dividends and can't be sold is worthless unless you can find a sucker.

You gotta have some solution where investors have something of some actual value at some point or you're going to see investment go away once they all decide there's no upside.

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No business grows forever - mature businesses should always pay dividends back to their shareholders, public or private.

True, certainly, but you can't expect people to invest and wait until the business is "mature" to collect anything in general. A business may take 10 years to mature or more, and it doesn't take much of a discount rate on your money 10 years from now to make the investment very unattractive under any realistic risk model.

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