alt Hacker Newsit is just so weird to me that nearly $9 BILLION can be created out of nowhere for nothing
how can that be healthy for civilization
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$9 Billion was not created, just exchanged, with some intermediary institutions and people making money for facilitating the transactions.
It's actually more like 1 trillion of value was "lost" when the stock dropped, and $9 billion was gained by some (and equivalently lost from others) for being right about the stock dropping.
Stock dropping is not literally a loss of any underlying good. It is a "assessment of how valuable something is". So when we say "omg we lost $1t in value" is not quite right. It's "we (everyone betting in the stock market) now collectively understand the value of this thing (company in this case) to be $1t less than assumed previously"
In this case, massive swings in value mean that the assessed value of a thing is very uncertain. I'd say this is extremely true for spacex, where in theory many people think it could be worth a fortune, or nothing, and no one can ever know the "true" value.
This is because there is not such thing as "absolute value" in the real world. And when it comes to things like stocks, "value" is just "hypothesized current value", which is a whole bunch of things combined: long term value of company, plus short term expected movement, even things like "who wants to own more of this this in the next few milliseconds", make up what a thing is estimated to be worth right now.
Assuming the stock market is some oracle of absolute value will make the world look insane. Seeing it as estimated value at one point in time in a very uncertain world where nothing has "true" value and all value is just relations between people and the things they want and the things they own and can exchange, is much closer to reality.
Those $9B are created the same way as when the stock would have risen. That's how most of the wealth in the stock market is created nowadays.
Ignorant yet loud opinions are even more unhealthy for civilization.
It's not created out of no where. It's traders saying that the stock is over priced and putting their money where their mouth is and taking on a big risk if they're wrong. They're extracting this money from folks that are putting upwards pressure on the stock saying it should be worth more. They're helping price the stock more efficiency and reducing index trader's expose to an overpriced stock e.g. retirement funds.