Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.
This is indeed what Salmon is saying: that we should value Twitter for the value that it provides us as consumers. For this is the value that it is providing, our ability to consume the products of the firm. This is entirely different from any other form of valuation of course. For example, this value in consumption doesn’t even turn up in the GDP figures, let alone anywhere else. Our pleasure, our utility, joy, whatever you want to call it, of alerting our followers to an interesting cat photograph is not measured in any manner at all yet it is precisely this consumer surplus that is the most important part of any economy. It’s what makes us all so gorgeously rich: that we get to consume goods and or services for less than the price we would be willing to pay for them.
The valuation that everybody really wants to know is of course what is Twitter’s stock price going to be? And that’s an entirely different calculation. It’s based upon what portion of that value that Twitter provides to us all that Twitter can capture minus the costs Twitter incurs in providing the service. None of which we know with any accuracy of course.
But it’s still worth recalling that wherever the stock price goes the real value of Twitter is that we get to Tweet. Not the jobs the company provides, not the stock price, not the taxes they do or do not pay. No, the value of any producer is determined by the consumption value that it provides, not by any other metric at all.
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