It's worth keeping in mind that Bell Labs existed because the government paid Bell to keep it open. I forget the precise agreement, but simply having the lab earned Bell money, it wasn't a cost center.
EDIT: I'm looking for a reference for this. I saw an article that says it was funded with 1% of company wide revenues. This is undoubtedly true, but a graduate student I know that knows about such things says that a substantial fraction or maybe even all of it was reimbursed.
I asked some people that were there and they said that Bell was a regulated monopoly and the government allowed them to charge an additional 10% to customers for investment. After competition and deregulation was introduced, things got increasingly more profit focused (as in research had to be justified on that basis). After the company broke up, there was some kind of cooperative lab between seven child companies that equally shared funding of it. However, that only worked well while they were prevented from competing with each other. Once competition was instituted, the companies started asking the lab to sell results to individual companies, and it went downhill from there.
EDIT: I'm looking for a reference for this. I saw an article that says it was funded with 1% of company wide revenues. This is undoubtedly true, but a graduate student I know that knows about such things says that a substantial fraction or maybe even all of it was reimbursed.