[tjs8rj]

Netflix and Airbnb are profitable, and as far as I can tell the others could be profitable but aren’t because they want to stay huge / have the capital access to do so. When you have unlimited money pouring in, whats the point of profit other than a checkbox for wall street? You can pay everyone their wages, compete fiercely, grow like crazy, and so on. Profit is just inefficiency - we don’t have a use for this money so we just put it in the bank.

I don’t disagree that Uber and Tesla and many of these are on life support currently, but from a game theory perspective, if you have unlimited access to money, why bother being profitable when you can just spend it getting bigger and smarter?

[kqr]

There is one fairly obvious reason: survival is the great filter. Anything that's not under survival pressure is almost by definition not good in the long run. If something is bad, you want it to die quickly before it becomes too big to fail.