[ThunderSizzle]

This is a naive take. Companies want their book-profit to be as close to zero, because they make their income tax to the IRS close to 0.

Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.

[gizmo]

Amazon was the exception actually. That's why it's the poster child for being perpetually break-even. The surge in AI capex spending of the last couple of years is partially because big tech has finally found something to shovel their billions into. Before that big tech just sat on their billions with no plan of what to do with it. But even AI spending doesn't really put a dent in the money pile because big tech is so astonishingly profitable. Apple makes $100 billion in accounting profit annually. Google and Microsoft each $75 billion. How can you reinvest that kind of money? You can't. It's too much. Even Amazon gave up and booked $44 billion in net profit.

[homebrewer]

So they effectively burn money, and yet OSS funding is an unsolved problem, and large parts of our foundation rely on unpaid volunteers "in Nebraska". Fantastic. I love the industry more and more with every passing day.

[triceratops]

Some real "they just write it off Jerry" energy in this comment.

[ThunderSizzle]

No. Your confusing different accounting methodologies. For tax accounting purposes, the goal is to show the IRS near-zero profit.

Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.