Both have pros and cons. Capital intensive businesses, once running, have their own barriers to entry (moats) "literally" built in: all those capital requirements help keep new entrants away. Capital-light business (and I am not sure the infrastructure investments to run a cloud service platform are so small), need to build this moat either by having access to consumer (data, network effects) and/or by keeping ahead of competition with constant innovation.

In practice though, msft, Google & FB have much better moats, via network/platform effects.

There are oil refineries that are decades old and still generate plenty of cash for their owners (granted, they need maintenance investments, but the bulk of the investment is certainly at the beginning), the same goes for cargo ships etc... While FB and GOOG need to come up with a new product or service every 6 months to keep those customers (see SNAP and their allegedly better fit with younger users). And MSFT wasn't in a very healthy situation just a few years ago. I have of course generalised and things are never clear-cut: servicing the high debt used to finance initial capital is also quite risky.

Their pnl can tell you that. They certainly are wonderful businesses for investors. The only problem is that they don't need investors' money. All investor demand does is enrich previous investors. It doesn't enable/change anything that outside exists outside of bank accounts.

Investment in a manufacturing company like Tesla enables more cars to be built, technology to progress and probably lots of 2nd order effects via their supply chain.

And by investing in more and more new software companies. The likelihood of them succeeding goes down. Roughly until an investment in a software company is as valuable as a hardware company.

> you can get it as long as you don't need it

There's another explanation for the statement above. The more you need the money, the grimmer the outlook is from the lender's perspective. So you're much more likely to secure capital/loan when you are already financially secure then when you are extended almost to the limit. And this is true regardless of the domain.

You give the money to make money so you're looking more at "sure wins" and less at risky bets.