&gt; It&#x27;s difficult to make an index fund of products.<p>Well, that&#x27;s what I said, companies are <i>vehicles</i>.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s difficult to retire on &quot;product dividends.<p>But you can retire on corporate dividends. And when a companies shares are acquired you either get money <i>or</i> shares in the acquiring company.<p>&gt; Companies exist as an attempt to get all the money in the world<p>How do you square that with &#x27;it is hard to retire on product dividends&#x27;? Companies pay out dividends to their shareholders.<p>Companies clearly do not exist to &#x27;get all the money in the world&#x27; because then the economy would grind to a halt.<p>&gt; and most fail that goal.<p>All companies fail that goal. They fail every time they buy new resources, pay out salaries, rent offices, pay out dividends and so on.<p>In fact, the <i>worst</i> thing for a company is to have a whole pile of cash and nothing to do with it, that&#x27;s money that is not currently working for the company in a meaningful way. That&#x27;s why companies tend to manage their liquid reserves very carefully.<p>&gt;  Apple is pretty close.<p>Close to getting all the money in the world? No, not even remotely close. And even all that money that Apple has is indirectly owned by the <i>shareholders</i> of Apple. Either Apple will have to spend it or they will have to pay out. Having it sit there does them no good.<p>&gt; Refusal to acknowledge failure as failure is pathological insanity.<p>Are you calling me insane in a roundabout way?<p>&gt; Getting paid to fail (or to &quot;soft land&quot; and save face on an outright failure) doesn&#x27;t mean the fail didn&#x27;t happen.<p>Oh, that happens. But it&#x27;s pretty rare. But better than chapter 11 if that&#x27;s the alternative.