Yes, the secret to their success is a lot of capital. They scale up hugely by steamrolling laws and providing their services at a greatly reduced cost in order to capture their market. Then, they can basically do whatever they want because they have a captive market.
It looks Uber like, 15 years to be profitable. It's still not profitable everywhere. The only reason they solidified their place is because they spent a ton of money to do it.
It's not a scam per-se, these companies do have value. The question is if their value makes any economic or business sense in an objective way, and the answer has been no. But it doesn't matter, because capital forgives all.