"If LLM makers seem cursed to an airline-style business destiny, how come they are able to raise so much money? ...What do they know that I don't? It is a mystery - but let's consider the options..."

Not mentioned: a lot of the "money" that they raised, was not actually cash but credits for cloud compute. If you've already bought too much cloud capacity, giving away some of it and claiming it as an investment in AI, looks like a good idea.