It's gives a better understanding of what's the bottom line after expenses.
You could have a ton of revenue, Walmart for example, but if you have razor thin margins that revenue won't necessarily translate into giant piles of money in the bank, which in the end is what most businesses are after.
I think Amazon was different from Apple and Google in that on the way up, they intentionally managed their cash flows to sort of keep their margins small (always investing extra cash into growth). Walmart is that, but to an extreme.
They could sort of just make money on the interest of their cash flow (I'm not an economist or accountant, so that is probably not true)
If Walmart could be making more money on interest from their cash flow, they would be already be making more money. It is not a novel or difficult idea.
The profit margins of the business of retail is not in the MAMAA league. Being a retail middleman is simply not as profitable as what the tech companies can do because they can scale at extremely low marginal costs, and barrier to entry is very high.
Amazon’s value lies in AWS and prime video/music/logistics/platform, not the part where you buy something shipped and sold by Amazon.com. Hence why Amazon removed the button to filter searches to only items shipped and sold by amazon, and why Walmart introduced their own version of a platform where they can make money as a platform, rather than a retailer.
Perspective is weird with large amounts of money. I think human brains are just not good at big numbers. You need something to compare it to, and the big numbers of other companies still leave it completely abstract.
Perhaps it might work better with a comparison to a person, like "Alphabet made so much revenue this quarter that, assuming they had no expenses, after a full year, Alphabet would have roughly as much money as Elon Musk." But maybe not, because now you've just moved the problem to understanding how rich Elon Musk is.
It's much harder to understand how rich Elon Musk is, because if he tried to sell even a small percentage of his Tesla shares, the value would evaporate. The revenue figures of these companies are more understandable because that is cold hard cash coming in the door
He actually sold a boatload of TSLA last year [1]. But yes, his wealth is not really expressible in USD.
If you tried to acquire a similar stake in TSLA, the price would shoot up and it would cost you more. If he tried to sell all his shares, it would plummet and he’d get less out.
Just recently I saw a headline about former Bezos wife selling $8B of Amazon stock. Does not seem to have affected the price all that much. She is probably going to have to pay $2B in taxes for that transaction.
Walmart has a higher revenue than all of the above (~140 billion)