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You are missing the emphasis on the market in stock market. By buying all the stocks of a company, you are basically taking company private – you own the company but the market for its stock is gone – and the value of what you own is the book-value of the business and access to its free cashflow. You don't own an instrument that gets you multiples on that anymore. Stock market gives you a multiple on the book value.

For example, if Elon Musk owned all of Tesla he would have access to $3.7B of its annual free cash-flow or $3.3B of net income. He won't be able to afford to buy Twitter with that. But because he has Tesla stocks which gets a huge multiple on those metrics, he can pledge a fraction of his fraction of ownership in Tesla to get a huge loan with which he is able to buy Twitter (and still enjoy his ownership rights of Tesla stocks!). That's because of stock market.



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