system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: In a stockmarket crash, where does all the value go to?
gpt
Imagine you find a car in your grandpa’s old storage unit.

You take it to a mechanic and he tells you it’s a one-of-one Plymouth Barracuda prototype worth a million dollars.

Great!  You’re a millionaire!  You take it to auction.

Upon further inspection… it’s a fake.

Did you just lose a million dollars, or was it all theoretical value that never existed in any concrete form?

A market crash is similar to this.  The theoretical value of stocks drops considerably, but there aren’t actually huge gobs of cash changing hands.