For the record, my initial question has been answered and I'm fine with the answer. We're just arguing semantics now.

What I'm saying is that you can pay money for something and have the value of that thing be more or less than the value of the money you paid. If that were not the case, no one would invest in the stock market, because, as we've determined, the ultimate value of the stock is determined by dividends the company pays plus end-of-life returns. My argument is that that ultimate value never changes, it's just impossible to know, since it's a fixed point in the future. The price you pay for stock is pushed by the stock market to what people think that ultimate value is going to be, and it's usually probably pretty close.

What you're saying is that the amount of money it would cost to buy all the shares of the company is the value of the company. I'm just saying that I'd rather reserve the term "value" for it's total final payoff and call the cost of buying all the shares something else. And the reason I say that is that, like I already pointed out, if you were to somehow buy all of the shares and then liquidate the company, the amount of money you got out of the liquidation is likely to be more than the amount you paid for the stock. Otherwise, corporate raiders wouldn't exist. And I contend that there needs to be separate terms for the price of all the shares combined and the ultimate value of the company.

But, like I said, I think we're just arguing semantics.