Yes, the profits it pays out are the one thing that actually makes sense, but the premise of the grandparent post was to ask what a share is worth _without_ dividends. And the answer is that shares are intrinsically worth very little. Liquidation value (actual liquidation - bankruptcy or going out of business or an exchange closure) is rarely ever practically realized for common investors. Even if you’re trading on the discounted expectation of a larger liquidation pie, nearly 0% is still nearly 0%.
Voting rights are also not valuable by themselves - they are only useful to steer the company towards greater future payouts, which means you are appealing to some other entitlement to value.
If you zoom out, a company is a temporary arrangement of people and things that makes more money than it spends _over time_. They are not really designed to accumulate and store value in and of themselves. The machines the employees use to do the work is a small fraction of the overall utility of a living breathing business. The valuable part is the capacity of this techno-social organism to reliably and continuously make profit, which is far greater than the sum of its parts. So if the profit that’s being earned is never paid out to stakeholders, then there’s no point in being a stakeholder. If the profit is redirected to make the organism bigger, then you are trading now-dollars for future-dollars which must be appropriately discounted. If everyone expects a company to do this forever, then the correct price is what the expected liquidation share should be, and that number is basically zero.
Yet, stocks that do not pay dividends exist at high valuations. What that tells you is that modern day stock trading is tulips: the lion’s share of the value derives from a temporarily stable, shared, _correct_ perception that someone else will buy it back from you.
The reality is that general investors are the greater fools in this arrangement. The prevalence of preferred stock is a tell that there are owners and there are “owners”. What we should do is recognize this and admit that the big initial investors and employees themselves are the owners, because they are the group small enough to actually realize liquidation value (should it ever be necessary). The public investors have no realistic claim on that value, so their shares should be more clearly labeled as dividend rights, which would cause them to be priced as such.