It’s fine to have multiple aims, but asking for investments without trying to be profitable is fraud.

Sort of. There's a class of startups that's not meant to be profitable, except maybe by happy accident. Many (most?) tech startups are like that now. After all, the investors don't care about creating profitable companies - they just want to make money, which they're positioned to do in many ways. One of them is to help create profitable companies. Another is to help grow companies to be sold to other companies and/or to the public for maximum value, giving the investors back a large multiple of initial investments, after which... they don't care anymore.

It's like with modern husbandry: you can make money selling milk, eggs and meat by sustainably raising animals living comfortable lives, but you can make more money by sticking them in cages, pumping them up with antibiotics and optimized fodder, to maximize production rates and minimize costs. The two approaches are inherently incompatible with each other. And I dare to say, modern startup ecosystem kind of entered the era of "factory farming" some time ago now.

Aiming to build a company to be bought by Microsoft or whoever is still aiming to be profitable, the product is simply the company’s assets (IP, customer list, etc).

It’s unsustainable in that the profit is a one time event, but that doesn’t mean you’re not to turn cash into something worth more than what you spent and then sell that thing.

That’s… not true at all.

Cooking books and falsifying projections is fraud.

Asking for investments with a clear disclaimer that the goal is a social good that won’t be profitable? If that’s fraud, then every major arts institution everywhere is guilty.

There is a reason we usually use the word donation in that context. And don’t call it investments. As those tend to be associated with an expectation to be paid back times x.

If you want money to provide a social good without the expectation that the money will be paid back, you're asking for a donation. You can also ask for money as a loan, fee for service, etc.

But an actual investment isn’t “investing in our community” it’s asking for money in exchange for to potential to gain more money etc.

In what way do you think building a new but still-uneconomic supersonic plane is going to change the world for the better?

Uber and Lyft are largely still unprofitable, but they definitely have changed the landscape, as many would argue, to the better.

The cost of putting a single car and driver-for-hire on the streets is a handful of dollars, so it's easy to do many of them at a loss. The cost of putting a single instance of a new airplane design of this scale into the air with even a single paying passenger is in the range of billions if not tens-of-billions of dollars.

This is not even remotely comparable.

But just for comparison, Aérospatiale and BAC actually built a real supersonic plane (Concorde) and managed to fly and operate that plane for decades. It's hard to find much measurable impact on the world at all. What do you propose would be different here, given that the discussion is already presuming a world in which they haven't succeeded economically?

Uber is not unprofitable, there are so many people that got rich off it, they just max out salaries and compensations.