Perhaps a better example would be the current tech companies: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Uber, and Reddit all ran losses for over a decade. This was only possible precisely because of deep pockets funded via capitalists looking to corner markets. People do not always act rationally and certain factors can create 'natural' monopolies, such as the Network Effect. The above companies (Uber excluded) specifically were funded for an extensive amount of time to exploit that network effect well before the market was ready for this kind of social media.