I get the feeling that the #steemit community is fairly young, so I enjoy attaching a bit of historical pop-culture context that is relevant to current news, particularly in finance. Today Verizon officially announced that it would buy what's left of Yahoo for the paltry sum of $4.8 billion. At its dot-com peak, Yahoo's market cap was approximately $100 billion:
And that's $100 billion of those valuable pre-QE dollars from the 1900s! I'll leave it to the professional pundits to discuss "what went wrong" or "how the mighty have fallen", but I want to relay that there was a time when Yahoo was synonymous with instant investing wealth, so much so that it was prominently featured in this underrated film from 2000:
Here's the original trailer - the movie is worth a watch, and I don't want to spoil the plot, but suffice to say there's some time bending and someone gets rich because they were told about YHOO before anyone knew what Yahoo was. It was a culturally relevant in-joke at the time, but looks pretty ridiculous from the hindsight of 2016.
This reminded me of an even older example of this, when Lieutenant Dan rolled Forrest Gump's share of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company into "some kind of fruit company":
(
In 1994 when the film was released, I thought Apple was a really odd choice for an icon of instant investing wealth - it had done well in the 80s, but it wasn't the cash-spouting market-cap juggernaut it is known as today. Fortunately for the film, if a teenager watches Forrest Gump in 2016, that investing in-joke is surprisingly relevant. . . and that teenager will wish his/her parents had purchased AAPL for their college fund the year they were born!
So why do I bring this up? Somewhere in the world right now, the next icon of instant investing wealth is languishing at a price that will look completely laughable in 2025. Will I be able to find it? Or will my children be wishing I had been prescient enough to purchase a stake in FutureCorp back in the day? I missed the first 10x in #steem. I hope to be a meaningful part of the next 1000x ;-)
Interesting point about Apple. I watched Forrest Gump for the first time in the late 90s around the time that Apple was a has been afterthought even after the return of Jobs. Wish I could have seen the future then!
So true. . . if only I'd listened to the wisdom of Gump. . .
that makes two of us...