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0 pointsimpossiblefork7mo ago0 comments

25B is the market cap of Ericsson, which is probably responsible for something like 5% of Sweden's GDP.

25B might not be a whole country, but it's definitely a whole country's phone network and internet infrastructure.

0 comments

There are lots of countries smaller and/or poorer than Sweden.

There are a number of very small countries with GDPs in the hundreds of millions of USD range. If you could buy a country for say 10× GDP you are looking at the low billions in GDP which is Bhutan or Zanzibar sized economies.

The problem is that countries are not often openly up for sale. You need military or political backing to actually get one. So you cannot literally buy a country.

On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to say that this amount of money is the value of an entire small economy, or of the entire stock market of a somewhat bigger one.

impossibleforkOP7mo ago

>On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to say that this amount of money is the value of an entire small economy, or of the entire stock market of a somewhat bigger one.

Yes. I think it's plausible to believe that it's a ridiculous valuation. That whatever the company has can be replicated for less money.

That's probably true for many companies, but seeing as Palo Alto Networks probably has some kind of software arm, it seems reasonable to expect that they'd actually have the capacity to get what they want for less.

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