Sure, the major shareholders might see their wealth increase noticeably, but anyone else (even small shareholders through option programmes) will generally not see a big effect.

Now, is that additional shareholder wealth really worth the years of engineer effort going into that?

Don't get me wrong: airbnb is an amazing service that has improved the lives of myself and other regular people.

I'm just arguing that maybe most of the benefit from society happened within the first couple of years plus maintenance and critical innovation as needed, and the rest is suboptimising for the benefit of the few.