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Comment by take_a_breath | Hacker News Reader

==A better question would be whether the expected value of all future cash flows has doubled. Evidently, a lot of people seem to think so.==

If there is a finite limit of "investable assets", then the relationship between those assets prices is not necessarily driven solely by sentiment in favor of Apple.

It could be that almost all other assets have seen their expected future cash flows fall while Apple's has slightly risen.

It could be that people's decision is not driven by future cash flows, but some other metric or feeling.

Have Tesla's expected future cash flows increased by 8.6X in the past 12 months? It's stock has gone from $220/share to $1,900/share.

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Right. It’s clearly hard to brass tacks a valuation of a 2T company, but one had better be forthcoming of even questionable quality. If no one else then Apple has a vested interest in knowing how close this valuation is to their internal knowledge. If they’re under then they could consider growing to the new valuation with opportunities otherwise unavailable outside this valuation. They could issue even more debt or offerings and go on a buying spree. Nvidia has a valuation of 300B (though probably also high relative to fundamentals). They could buy nvidia and own the future of the ML/AI market as well as the gaming market they’ve typically been shut out from competing. Toyota’s more like 190B. They could buy Toyota and immediately be one of the top auto manufacturers. They could probably do this an embarrassingly large number of times for many industries at this valuation.

They won’t buy companies that bring their margin down; automakers have been struggling on hair-thin margins for years.

Agree if they were to continue run Toyota as is.

That said said, if Apple bought them for accelerating their self-driving car development, the historical profit margins are irrelevant. The the valuation would still be all about the future opportunities and future cash flows. This relative to other opportunities in the market, as other commenters rightly point out.

It's going to be extremely interesting to see how Apple will take advantage of their sky-high valuation. Not to mention the pile of cash they're sitting on.

Yup, the valuation doesn't have to be driven solely by what Apple is doing as a company. In fact, Apple doesn't need to do anything at all if all other stocks and asset classes suddenly become less attractive.

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