[wpietri]

You write in a tone of contradiction, but I'm having trouble understanding how your points relate to mine. I don't believe I said that never-profitable businesses were unique to this era, or that the only business failures lately have been ridiculous ones.

I also think Amazon is distinct in that they chose to not have profits because they saw better uses for the money. Bezos could have declared big profits long before he did, and there was a noisy contingent of investors who were agitating for it. Bezos instead chose long-term investment in ways that upended our notion of commerce, and whose effects are still playing out.

I think that's very different than WeWork and Uber, where a lot of investor money was burned on subsidizing the core business. At least in Uber's case there was a theory, which was basically, "Use the rise of mobile to capture the global taxi market (while externalizing the capital costs to the desperate) and then use pricing power to extract Google-size monopoly rents." Maybe not a great theory, but at least something articulable. Whereas WeWork never made any sense as a business beyond a hazy "Uber for offices" handwave.

[nojvek]

Amazon is perhaps one of the best executed businesses. Their retail logistics physical footprint is insanely huge and chews billions in capital. They chose to reinvest their profits to stronghold their logistics position.

In terms of warehouse square footage, they are the biggest by a wide margin (~320M sqft - probably more now) https://www.bigrentz.com/blog/amazon-warehouses-locations

Now they're playing the card of AWS but for physical logistics. They're opening up their warehouses and logistics as a service to others.

Every company ought to be investing it's profits for long term gains.

The fact that Apple is sitting on so much cash that it doesn't know what to do is not a great play.

I'm willing to bet that in 10 years, Amazon will be bigger than Apple in market cap.