They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank.

In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.

> The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget.

This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of running the website.