Lyft has enriched its investors far more than any baseball player could even dream of. You're just looking at accounting losses. But when this IPOs, early stage investors will have all made billions.

But that's not creating value. Unless the lottery creates value for people who buy the right tickets.

The current price is the market's expectation of value throughout the existence of the company. The market believes that these past cash flows are not indicative of the company's future ability to create accounting value. And you may choose to value a growth company by its historical cash flows, but the market doesn't.

The value was created on the company itself, thanks to the early funds of the investors. Value was definitely created..

What value is exactly a baseball player creating? Lyft has provided WAY more value to society over its lifetime.

Drawing viewers' eyes to lucrative television timeslots for advertisers, selling tickets to local stadiums, and selling merchandise such as jerseys and figures.

Those are all wealth transfers, though, not really value creation. The only value creation by the baseball players is the entertainment provided (which is definitely not nothing).

How about getting a massage? “Wealth transfer”? Or “value creation”?

Value creation, they're fixing/entertaining the customer.

The baseball player brought joy to other humans, which is the whole bottom-line point of the entire economic system.

Lyft has burned piles of investor cash to give people artificially cheap taxi rides; the wealth-transfer is zero-sum and it's actually worse than that because their dumping distorts the real transport market (and exacerbates the negative externalities of cars). You could argue they've done some genuine value creation by being a more efficient taxi dispatcher, but if there was any substance to that then they'd have a profitable business.