If he has no shareholders and no outside sources of debt funding (loans) to repay, his “business” never needs to make a profit though.
Yes it does. How does it grow? How do you expand operations or upgrade equipment? If you’re breaking even and something breaks, how do you replace it?
Would income be profit if it were used to build the business? I wouldn’t say so, necessarily.
It is.
Profit is quite literally only the money left over after a business accounts for all expenses. Reinvestment is not seen as an expense, as it can only happen in the business cycle after the money was generated.
It doesn’t really matter what you define it as, profit has two distinct purposes, and the first is for reinvestment into the company that created it. The second is to pay shareholders and generate wealth. The second purpose is what socialism and sane people are opposed too, but you cannot run a profitless firm, it is not possible.
A worker can never receive 100% of the value they generate, as it would not be materially possible even without profit because of taxes. They should receive as much as possible, however a portion must be divided out for investment back into the labour.
That’s why socialism advocates for coops owned by the workers who can make those decisions themselves, and state ownership, as the state is not motivated by greed.
What does “grow” mean? What if JT doesn’t want to become a multimedia empire? What if he’s fine with his small crew, doing the few YT channels and podcasts that he’s already doing?
Profit is just the leftovers, Revenue - Costs. But its relative to a time period.
You can have negative profit in a week during a month, break even during a different week during the same month and have a profit by the end of the month but still have negative profit once you start adding in the costs of the next month.
So unless you’re waiting until the end of a set fiscal period to do your business purchasing, its going to wind up being a cost of doing business.