I have no doubt there are a handful of positive examples when we ignore the tens of thousands of failed companies along these lines.

I have no problem with money-furnaces trading publicly. If people want to invest in those, fantastic, power to them. But they absolutely should not be included in vehicles like pensions and indexes.

But Google didn't go public until 2004, when they were highly profitable.

Every startup goes through a phase where they aren't profitable... For most of of them that ends when they go bankrupt.

> Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?

We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time.

Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years.

Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)

You seem to be ignoring that a loss lead is supposed to lead people into doing something profitable.

Survivorship bias.

Also, those numbers are multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the AI stuff going on now.