I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.

The exception proves the norm.

The only major example I can think of is Amazon dot com which famously reinvested all its profits into itself for well over a decade.

The fact that investors didn't punish Amazon dot com was seen as befuddling in the press.

> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.

No, I don't think this is true at all because you used the word "routinely". I would claim it is very rare.

Growth in this case can also be growth of valuation. Or maybe that is in general the goal. Get the market cap or nominal valuation to go up.

Some money is lost to push up this valuation or valuation based on some future sales, or market share or anything...

> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.

But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.

We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.

It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.