Most tech companies (or even game companies) are not proper companies, they do not function based off profits. They function based on funding rounds (Discord, Reddit, Open AI etc), they effectively just keep begging for money from mega wealthy people and using snakeoil salesman tactics to get money to fund the company well beyond their means. Many of these companies make zero profits.
You are confusing tech startups with established tech corporations, those are wildly different things.
Tech startups are entities working towards building
something of value and while profits are very nice they really just want value as their ultimate goal is to sell that value to someone else. That someone else is either a larger tech company like Microsoft, Broadcom, Meta or Amazon, or to the public via IPO. Established tech companies are those that have already transitioned into a full profit model by leveraging whatever products or offerings they have.
This is discord, because you mentioned them.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/
Total investment is $1bn USD, total valuation is $14bn USD, revenue is around $500~600 million USD, though they are still operating at a loss. Back in 2024 they terminated a large number of staff to reduce operating expenses and I suspect they are going to start selling gaming usage data as a secondary revenue stream in preparation for either an IPO or a sale.
Ever noticed how most of us have discord starting automatically and it displays which game you are playing? Yeah they are in a key position to sell gaming usage data either directly to game publishers or to data brokers who will then sell it to game publishers.
OpenAI wasn't even a for-profit company. It was founded and funded as a non-profit company then back in 2019 pull a fast one and "restructured" by starting a new for-profit company and transferring all the IP into that company. Right now they are a privately held company and I'm pretty sure they are being used as a debt bag for lots of this AI circular investing nonsense.