What you said makes sense if a company&#x27;s stock price (and market cap) was correlated with the size or stability or profitability of the company. That&#x27;s usually not the case though. People buy and sell stocks based on their predictions about other people buying and selling the same stocks, which itself is only indirectly based on a company&#x27;s performance.<p>You are correct that in an ideal world, $14b sounds like a lot for Keurig, but that&#x27;s pretty mild compared to other valuations (in the tech industry in particular, and among startups in particular) that we all read about every day. Apple reports record profits? The stock tanks. Amazon loses money? Hey everybody, let&#x27;s double down on Amazon. Facebook&#x27;s market cap is over $300b right now. $300b for Facebook, let that sink in. Twitter&#x27;s market cap is currently $17b in spite of having no path to long-term stability or profitability in sight.<p>The one thing a company can do to improve its stock price seems to be to show growth. If there&#x27;s growth, your stock is likely to go up. If there&#x27;s not growth, even if you remain insanely successful and profitable, your stock doesn&#x27;t stay the same- it&#x27;s likely going to go down (MS in the aughts being a prime example). Investors seem to value growth (and fear the lack of growth) far more than they care about the fundamentals of the companies they invest in, at least in the tech industry.<p>Every market has natural forces acting on it that push it towards efficiency and rationality, but most people learn about those concepts and stop there. IMO, understanding a market means understanding why a given market isn&#x27;t 100% efficient or rational in spite of those forces, and in the case of the stock market I fear that it&#x27;s mostly driven by the Greater Fool Theory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Greater_fool_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Greater_fool_theory</a>