alt Hacker NewsNo, market cap does not come out of thin air. Money flows in one direction and human activity and real changes in the physical world flow in the other direction.
Nobody is mad about the billionaires having a lot of money - they are mad that people are pissing in water bottles to make their route, or having the city’s public infrastructure privatized, or the many other fantastic real world changes that are on the other side of these fantastical market caps.
Market cap is based on people making estimates of future cash flow. (Especially for growth companies.) Predictions aren’t physical and can be wrong.
It’s also true that these companies raise and spend money and that results in physical changes in the world, but angry people on the Internet aren’t necessarily well-informed about what those changes are. There are lots of myths.