alt Hacker News> I'm having a hard time responding to someone who's using a South Park episode as a discussion point. Like how can I debate a point made by a show that makes content reacting to the popular perception of certain ideas?
The South Park episode came out in 1998, when the profitability of tech companies was… questionable, but their popularity was very high. It was social commentary on the zeitgeist and group think of the time. And it turned out the irrational exuberance was not justified for the valuations, as everyone learned post-2000.
And have we learned anything since then? What are valuations and P/E multiples now? And it goes back centuries in the past as well, so 'modern tech' is hardly the driving force:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
Your original post stated "the legion of badly performing companies that went public and were thoroughly rejected by public investors". The historical record shows that these companies going public were not "thoroughly rejected".
If you're using South Park and "social commentary on the zeitgeist" as a way to think about markets, I think we're not going to have a productive conversation. A public equity market in the US has a technical definition that I'm using here. You're constructing a narrative out of these things that really makes no sense. When one said that public investors reject an investment, that means they mark the price of the equity down by selling shares for a lower level.