"Your factory equipment will be sold to the highest bidder, and your shareholders will be given the money that was left-over (after bondholders and suppliers are paid)."

dragontamer

""If a shareholder sees a company they own shares in has filed Chapter 7, it is near certain they’ll receive nothing," [Lynn M. LoPucki, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and the founder of the UCLA-LoPucki Bankruptcy Database] said. "If they see a company has filed Chapter 11, it's highly probable they will receive nothing.""

https://www.finra.org/investors/what-corporate-bankruptcy-me...

"Although a company may emerge from [Chapter 11] bankruptcy as a viable entity, generally, the creditors and the bondholders become the new owners of the shares. In most instances, the company's plan of reorganization will cancel the existing equity shares. This happens in bankruptcy cases because secured and unsecured creditors are paid from the company's assets before common stockholders. And in situations where shareholders do participate in the plan, their shares are usually subject to substantial dilution."

https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/invest...

"Also a false assertion. The stock's price is most commonly tied to the equipment, land, and other resources a company holds."

dragontamer

No. No, no, no. When you buy any financial instrument, you are giving someone money now in exchange for a (hopefully larger)[1] sum of money to be returned to you later.

The majority of the millions of Tesla investors can believe anything they want, but I'll guarantee you that Baillie Gifford & Co, Capitol World Investors, the Public Investment Fund, Vanguard, Blackrock and the other 926 institutional investors that own 56.27% of TSLA shares (https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/ownership-summary) do so because they expect to get more money out of the company than they put in.

You will find some investors define the "value" of a share of stock to be the net present value of the sum of the portion of future earnings the share represents. That's wrong; it's actually the net present value of the dividend stream plus any residual paid to shareholders when the company is wound up. (And yes, I've actually owned shares in companies that paid out on being finalized; I'd recommend against it as it confuses the daylights out of your broker's account tracking stuff. It took years to get the 0-value shares off my holdings list. The one interesting thing you will notice is that when a company announces the intention to do that, their share price immediately moves to be somewhere near their distribution value divided by the number of outstanding shares.) You will find exactly no one serious who defines the value of a stock to the company's book value, for any company that is a going concern. (Special situation investor note: if you find a company whose shares are worth much less than their book value per share (minus "intangible" parts of the book value, which are worthless), you may have found a good investment. Cough, cough, GME.)

The bottom line is that if you give money to a company in, say, an IPO, and that company never pays a dividend, they will eventually go out of business and you will get approximately nothing. You will have made a bad investment. The only hope for you, personally, is to sell your shares to some greater idiot and let them ride the shares down to worthlessness. That is very much a zero-sum game: any money you gain selling your share is lost by someone else. (Wait---the initial investment. It's actually a negative sum game.)

[1] Insurance is a special case. That I'm not getting into here.