Companies with lots of investors can afford to operate at a loss. Generally, once a company has a significant market share and has flushed out enough of its competitors, they can charge higher prices later for whatever service they provide for a significant profit. That is the theory, anyway.

I know that many of the schemes from the above scenario are usually illegal these days, but the above example is the gist of it. Walmart’s attempted entry into Germany is a good example of how to fail hard at taking over a specific market: https://ecomclips.com/blog/why-walmart-failed-in-europe-what-went-wrong-in-germany/

Also, companies can just flat-out lie for new investment money. They can manipulate projections or inflate company value to offload shares to a new sucker. You can have CEOs that just blabber off about bullshit or sell services that never really materialize. (Elon and his self-driving car promises or the now concluded drama about Theranos as examples.)

In the end, a company can succeed or it fails hard. It doesn’t really matter to the executives since they still get paid and investors will take the loss. (In some of the worst cases, the government has to prop up the company to keep it from collapsing, so taxpayers take the loss.) If the company fails gracefully, hopefully they will have a collection of resources to sell off to get some of the money back.