It may be a question of perspective, but in my mind mathematics is upstream to everything else, including physics, biology, etc. And it doesn't just exist in the human mind or the "world of forms", as in Platon's realm of ideas. It's more fundamental than that, closer to the foundation from which all existence emerges. Our reality is like a shadow of a shadow, a fleeting illusion, compared to the eternal reality that gives birth to all lesser realities.

As for profit, there's a reason why governments and AI companies are hiring philosophers and mathematicians. It's not to make the world a better place for everyone, or to encourage the progress of human knowledge; but to gain cutting-edge advantages over their competitors. Same reason why theoretical physicists were prized before/during the Second World War.

I have never seen a profitable enterprise that doesn’t have a core of people good at math defending the maximum money behavior. A lot more people graduate with math degrees than can get jobs in research maths, but finance, operations research, insurance companies, logistics, all can hire a lot of them. As a software engineer with a math degree, I find that some of software is like math, but not very often like research math and relatively few of my colleagues have math degrees.