[adventured]

No, Walmart has always been a careful, profitable business by necessity (thanks to extremely low margins). It's not just because they ran out of ideas to fund in the last ten or N years.

For most of their early existence, they didn't have bubbly capital markets to ride as Amazon did during the dotcom bubble and presently. What made Amazon possible turned out to be a very short-term fluke of history that Bezos took great advantage of. He needed to thread the needle and did just that. Amazon nearly collapsed into insolvency specifically because rather than rely on a profitable business they were leaning on funding to subsidize their vast red ink (as eg Uber is currently). That's an approach Walmart never had the option of taking, and in the decades since they've also never had the luxury of routinely being valued at 200x earnings. Amazon isn't a special alien organism, they're one part retailer (boring old retail), one part platform for distribution (eg retail and media), one part software company (cloud etc); they are particularly good at what they do.

Walmart pays high taxes because they generate most of their income in the United States market. Which is the same reason that Delta has a high corporate income tax, and the same reason Whole Foods does. It's the reason Foot Locker paid a 34% corporate income tax rate last year.