[fragmede]

> even bankruptcies usually return some fraction of value to shareholders.

The three issues with that are 1) liquidation preferences, 2) the fact that normal people can only afford to hold an infinitesimal amount of Amazon stock, and 3) (basically) only common stock is available for purchase by normal people. This means while that's technically true, unless you're, eg Jeff Blackburn, you ain't getting shit if Amazon were to close shop and return the money to investors.

Let's say you're holding 100,000 shares of AMZN. At ~$3k per share, that's some $300mm in shares, but with 508.84M shares outstanding, that's a grand total of... 0.02% stake in the company. In an unlikely fire-sale of the company and returning value to shareholders, that could still be worth something, but it's a unreassuringly small number.