> The only time money actually flows to the company is when stock is initially offered.

> A company might be valued billions in the stock market, but this is not money that the company can work with.

Both of these statements are demonstrably false. Why do you think companies go public (which is quite troublesome) in the first place? Just vanity to see the billions they don't have access to? Or to allow investors to make money without helping the company in any way? It's clear why investors would come to a purely speculative market with no intrinsic value (e.g. crypto) but it's unclear why a company would offer their shares to be traded like a shitcoin.

Being public is the instrument for the company first and foremost. There's the IPO, then companies continuously issue and buyback stocks depending on the cashflow. Look e.g. at the graph of Tesla's outstanding shares [1]. Then companies also sell bonds or borrow money using their own stock as the collateral. The bigger valuation you have the more capital you have access to.

Not to mention that even in the OP's simplistic view of the market there is an actual "new value" aspect: if you buy stocks from a VC or a founder, they use it to fund the next startup.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/shares-...