In other words, I don't agree that the bigger the company, the more exposure that company is guaranteed to a certain business or operating model's deficiencies - quite the opposite,

I agree with you as a general principle. Economies of scale and diversity can both make larger companies more risk tolerant.

In this particular case, I was responding to this:

However, these are two startups that aren't making profit and the bubble is about to pop. Only the strong will survive. It's not appropriate to model either as regular businesses considering that the fundamentals of both can be completely out of whack and still garner investment cash.

If both companies are not making a profit and the fundamentals of both are "out of whack", then they're not benefiting from economies of scale or diversity since both are already geographically world wide. If investment cash is keeping both afloat, then infusions of cash are unlikely to last indefinitely. The larger the company, the more cash is likely being used quicker, so it has the bigger exposure.

I don't know if any of this is actually happening. I was just responding to the quote.

The ride share company with the most backing will be able to expand faster, more easily, and further. If a company succeeds in that more quickly than all other companies, it will grow to dominate the market everywhere.

This is possible, but not necessarily true. It's also possible that more than one company can grow simultaneously and share the market.

As for how one company's bad press might impact another company's reputation based on investments, it's a real thing called reputation risk and in US financial industries at least real people have real jobs where their duty is to look out for exactly such a thing.

Google ain't a financial industry but I doubt they don't have people in exact such roles as well.

I agree that reputation risk can be real. In this case, if there's a reputation risk from bad press about Uber, Google hasn't considered the reputation risk high enough to not invest in Uber. There hasn't been anything discussed so far that would raise that reputation risk for Apple.

Here's a hint, by the way - sometimes, the average consumer's opinion doesn't mean shit in terms of the "reputation risk" of a certain action. But in the eyes of legislatures, it sure as hell does. Companies aren't playing their reputation risk cards to consumers all the time, they're playing them to the gov't.

That may be true in general. In this case, considering that Apple just refused to respond to the government when the government was asking for Apple to crack the code on the iPhone, Apple's investment in a company in China doesn't look like posturing to the US legislature.

If Apple is posturing to the Chinese government, there's no reason for that government to care about Uber's reputation, which is largely tarnished in other countries.