Donkeys are not worth their weight in gold

Donkeys don’t monetise.

Donkeys are fungible.

You can replace a donkey with another donkey, and other than the attitude of an individual beast, the output, the work product, is exactly the same.

When a resource, product, or output of a process is fungible, i.e. completely replaceable with a different product or service that provides the same utility, then the output is always used to create value for someone else.

And the moment that value is only be created for someone else, there is an intense downward pressure to reduce the cost of the product or service to as near zero as possible.

Profitable businesses build non-fungible products or services, even if the underlying product or service, without its differentiators, is inherently fungible.