Uber has never once turned a profit, and is allowed to continue running their business. If you’re a small business owner running an ebay or ecom business, and you claim losses for 3 out of 5 years in a row, it’s likely that the IRS will audit you, and could deem you a hobby. Amazon is often cited as not generating a profit for many years, but is now profitable. For them, it was somehow okay to run a business making no profit! So like, how come small businesses can’t claim losses, but big corps can?
And the same thing is true for private businesses, most of the time they’re only private in the sense that the “shares” aren’t listed on the stock market, there’s still a bunch of investors behind the scene that each own a certain % of the company, it’s not just the figurehead that acts like they’re the sole owner (see Twitter with Musk and the documents released recently showing how much money for the purchase came from third parties).