Re:Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires
by antpls on Sunday August 11, 2019 @05:05PM
(#20670506)
Your sentence seems to insist on "billions", but it's not that much in regard to all the invested money in the world. According to UNESCO (http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-devel...), the world's spending on R&D (only) is estimated to be $1.7 trillions. Apple's R&D investment for 3rd quarter of 2019 is $4.2 billions. So, yes, billions are burned in the hope of finding things. Most probably, future generations will even burn hundred of trillions.
So they have been burning billions of dollars in the hopes that there might be a business model in the future?
Maybe it's just that VCs were naive to think that taxis and food delivery were good businesses.