A profitable company is not necessarily seen as a successful company anymore, because a company’s value in the eyes of investors is no longer based on profit. It is based on the perception that the company will be more profitable in the future, which drives speculative valuation, which in turn creates more value for an investor than the piddly five-year projection type value that normal investors have to settle for. The modern media corporation is effectively a hedge fund—a collection of speculative assets that are expected to grow and grow, year after year. And to feed the dream of fully scalable infinite expansion, in every direction, forever, even a good business like ESPN needs to find new revenue streams.
The 2019 docuseries Action, produced by Showtime, provides a good window into the mass legalization of sports betting, which this article plays down in a way that seems a little strange to me. Running a very profitable sports book is deceptively difficult, for a bunch of reasons, and the only way sports gambling can be a gold rush is if most of the money getting bet is very dumb money. Even then, sports prediction is famously difficult and fraught, and companies can have extremely bad days if there are big upsets, even given an "ideal" customer base consisting entirely of suckers and bag holders. It's an unbelievably ill-advised business model to "bet everything" on.