That's not how business works. For any definition of 'business.'
we're not talking about whether it's "worth it" for him, we're talking about from the point of view of whether the online business can be called profitable to an outside investor. Nobody cares about your unpaid sunk development costs.
Not if they happened a year or six months ago, but if your unpaid sunk development costs are happening every day, then you're not profitable. You're not profitable until you're paying everyone who is working for you something relatively close to the wage they could be making as a regular employee somewhere else.