[shalmanese]

I should have clarified that over a long enough timescale, profit has to go somewhere and the only place it can go is shareholders. Right now, Google's profit is sitting as massive cash hoards. Profit that gets reinvested back into the company isn't profit anymore. It's just spending.

Of course, even the word profit itself is ambiguous because it's potentially referring to multiple different concepts. The aim, for this was to illustrate at a high level why investors generally don't want a company to be profitable until they want it to be very profitable.