Not ironic, no. It's just the truth. Do you think WhatsApp or Instagram would be worth billions if they had to make money? With the absolute minuscule amount of profit they might make, their valuation would be worth maybe hundreds of thousands. Not billions.
The reason they're valued so highly isn't because of how much money they would make, but how much value they would bring to an already profitable company. Those valuations aren't based on the idea of profits, but on the idea of being bought out by a bigger player. If they started making money on their own, that value would drop massively.
This kind of stuff sounds EXACTLY like what people were saying during the first dot-com bubble. Did you mean that ironically perhaps?