[tombert]

Yes but they would only need enough to keep the lights on and pay the engineers.

When you're a for-profit company, especially a public one (which I believe they're looking to be soon), you can't just maintain homeostasis. Your investors want growth every quarter.

Conceivably if they stayed non-profit then they could charge just enough to maintain the project, and they wouldn't necessarily have to have ads.

[dnnddidiej]

The lights being billions in hardware and plant investment, possibly power generation and operations and maintenance, attracting and retaining top 0.01% of engineers.

In addition if you don't keep up with SOTA +/- 10% you instantly lose all customers. There is zero stickiness.

[tombert]

Sure. That still is different than expecting 10-15% yearly growth like publicly traded companies are.