Well, no comment on if they're suckers or not, but I think this is a misunderstanding of what a share in a company is. With a share, you own something with actual tangential value, i.e. claim on dividends/voting rights/cash flow/etc. Plus the company itself can actually go and do valuable things and make money - Apple can go and sell a bunch of iPhones and make a ton of money, and then reward their investors through dividends, buybacks, etc. That's not zero sum, there was something of value created and provided to the world. I do understand that in reality many people play the stock market like it's a casino, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still fundamentally different.