The writer is professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University
In the past few weeks, Tesla, a company with less than $50bn in revenues that only recently became profitable, joined the rarefied list of groups with trillion-dollar market capitalisations. Rivian, a company with no revenues and big losses, went public with a market cap exceeding $100bn.
The debate that ensued was predictable. On the one side, sceptics used pricing metrics, such as price-earnings ratios and revenue multiples, to argue that these and other young technology companies were overpriced, evidence that the market was in bubble territory.