I don't know that I'd say they refuse to believe it, it's more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.

Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that... as long as it's within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.

Newell doesn't have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he's in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes "no shit, Gabe" and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.

It's a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.