[Ma8ee]

Amazon has never paid any dividends.

Further, you are just plain wrong about both of your points. At least as general statements.

1. Of course there are some businesses that are created to be able to pay the owners of the capital dividends (or more common, to be able to sell the business later to someone who hopes to be able to collect dividends). But a lot of businesses are created to for people to just being able to do their job. Say a gardener who wants to work with tending gardens. Their main purpose of the business is not to collect dividends, and they may never do.

2. That a business sole purpose only is to pay the owners is a quite recent (popularised in the eighties) neoliberal idea and far from any universal truth. The purposes of any single business can be whatever the business owner wants, which range from the obvious, become rich, to serving the community with some particular goods or service, providing employment and security to the local workforce or creating opportunity for people work with some craft they love.

The stakeholders in a business are far from only the people that invested capital in it. They also include the local community, the employees and the family, and of course the customers.

[foldingmoney]

Most of the people criticising my points are glossing over the key word of my post, which is listed. Not every business is listed, and those can be run for all sorts of reasons, but a listed business is a stock first and a business second. The stock is meant to enhance the owners' wealth (whether by going up, paying dividends, or both), and the business is just the means to that end. At least in theory, when that happens in a well regulated society, it turns out that the best way to make the owners richer is to give people what they want, and to allocate capital in the most efficient and productive way. Obviously reality may differ.

[eru]

Amazon has bought back stocks, which is economically equivalent to paying dividends.

[Ma8ee]

Not in all regards. The owners don't get any cash without selling stock.

[eru]

To spell it out, ignoring transaction costs and taxes the following two are economically equivalent:

- You own some stock. The company pays dividends. You reinvest the dividends into buying more stock.

- You own some stock. The company buys back stock.

A different equivalence:

- You own some stock. The company pays dividends.

- You own some stock. The company buys back stock. You sell stock until your percentage share in the company is the same as before.