It's not stupid. They do own something, an extraordinarily valuable something. What they own is as real as a billboard company. They own as much as a catalog company (for sale aggregation) in a past era might have.

What they own is as real as anything a car insurance company owns. It's as real as crypto-currencies. It's as real as Amazon.com's store, which is now 1/2 inventory not owned by Amazon; or eBay for that matter, or any other offline auction service that has ever existed. It's as real as cloud computing.

There are dozens of other common business examples, from the present and past.