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... in aggregate. there are lots of people in even small companies that work for "cost centers"...

Even "cost centers" are a net benefit, unless something is horribly broken.

Maybe you don't have the data to make that determination.

Maybe fries aren't profitable yet, but you're hoping to make them become so.

Maybe you have to have fries on the menu even though you make more money off soda.

I'm sure there are a few people that Google employs "Because awesome." The self-driving cars thing comes to mind, though I'm sure that could be explained by giving people another hour every day to sit on the internet looking at ads.

Currently all of the Google Maps data for the US (and increasingly, other parts of the globe) is generated in-house by the street view cars - they don't just generate the data for street view, they also generate most of the data for the actual road layout of the maps now, too.

If the cars drove themselves, instead of Google having to pay actual people to drive around every single road on the planet all the time, that would be a pretty huge cost saving, I would imagine.