Palantir had $50M to spend on "something else (labor, inventory, market research, sales, etc...)" and simply shifted this opportunity to the gold broker.
The parent comment implied that this new found $50M was somehow going to magically create new opportunities for the current circulating capital. It's not.
The price of gold is speculative which means its very possible (and very likely) they lost money on the transaction.
Essentially a huge pool of unproductive assets like Artwork, Gold, Bitcoin, even Cash etc which seemingly hold a great deal of economic value, but fundamentally their economically irrelevant. Buying and selling them doesn’t really consume significant resources it’s just a handoff, every dollar going in is a dollar going out to either a middleman or a previous owner.
"productive investments" - what does that even mean? When a business has cash on hand it needs to decide what it is going to do with it to produce the greatest return possible. It doesn't matter whether you put it in an appreciating asset (gold bar potentilla) or an employee salary, businesses are just looking to get the highest return on the cash they have left from operations.
> Buying and selling them doesn’t really consume significant resources it’s just a handoff,
Do you think Fort Knox is free to operate?
Compared to value stored it was. The base was already there, they built a small building, effectively reused military manpower, and stored almost 13,000 tons of gold. We are talking well under 1/1,000th the amount stored in expenses per year. At that point fluctuations in golds value are significantly more important than storage costs.
Consider in a more modern context how much security you put around an arbitrary amount of gold vs armed ICBM’s. Store them both in the same building and the gold is practically an afterthought.
Either way, the $50MM still exists and is circulating, facilitating the buying and selling of things. It did not disappear or go out of circulation.
If they bought a year ago, they not only would have lost money on the transaction just from the transaction alone, but would have lost even more money due to inflation.
This is why assets that provide no utility (gold) rarely create value long term.
Personally I think we should be gilding more religious icons and applying leaf to pages of college text books so they don’t seem like such a raw deal.
Wealth creation (which then flows to those things you mentioned) is typically seen when you use a scarce material to create goods and services that drive profits that then are used for those activities.
For example, let's say you bought $50M worth of gold bars, melted them and and sold them as earrings for $100M. NOW you have $50M to pay for labor, inventory, sales, etc.