| You talk as if Amazon was like an Uber or WeWork. That's really far from the truth. Amazon were slightly profitable or break-even since 2003. There's a convenient chart of their profits since day one here: https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-... Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits. How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market. https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Ama... Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it. The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public. |