Regarding the share of the profits I already explained. You have your share of the profits in form of liquid stock that you can decide to sell. It's the same thing.

And the answer could then be that you’re investing in a company which allows them to grow, and your money with them. Or that you store your money in a medium that hopefully at least keeps up with inflation (especially if you’ve spread the risk). Or just that you’ve taken a gamble and hope that other people will think the stock is worth more at some later point than it was when you bought it.

You know other people can look at a balance sheet of a company and also judge it's value based on how much it produces and on the expectation of future buybacks that will increase your share's worth. I wouldn't call the absense of dividends the maker of a pyramid scheme.

Again, it's the lack of dividends and the lack of any other tangible benefits of owning the stock like voting rights. I feel like you're so far down the "line goes up" rabbit hole of stock trading, that you can't even think clearly about what you're actually buying, and why would anybody buy it from you in the future.

So as a warning to whoever reads this, do a search for "dual class stocks", and see how many companies sell stock without voting rights as % of any index. Then see how many don't issue dividends. You'll see it's a completely separate subject.

They’re simply listing the two things they think actually provide any real value when owning stock, as opposed to ”line goes up”.

In other words, they’re asking why owning stock has actual value. They dismiss ”line goes up”, which only leaves dividends and voting rights. By that logic, if you aren’t paid any dividends and you don’t have voting rights, what is the point of owning the stock, except to gamble? That is what they want to know.

And then I think that what you have been saying, correctly in my opinion, is that ”line goes up” actually does have real value. But no one is trying to claim that dividends and voting rights aren’t separate things.