True, but laptops have a fixed price. They aren't worth $0 most of the time and $1B a tiny fraction of the time.

This may in fact, be wrong, if that laptop is the only way to say, stop and outage costing 100 million a minute.

It would be worth $0 most of the time, and ~100 million a minute during that outage.

(Rather than IP, let's say the laptop's TPM chip is what is necessary to get access to stop the outage, so it's tied to something real)

No, a laptop is worth what you can sell it for. You're over-thinking this.

But companies also (especially startups) are valued by what they might become in the futre.

I was taking this into account. Bear in mind that the future value of laptops is very low indeed.