This seems like a huge distinction that people don't make often enough with high-performing, fast-growing companies. You see it with Tesla, too, when people claim that the Model S is "sold at a loss", ignoring the fact that a large part of the company's current expenditure is in setting up huge new factories.

Bad example. New factory is an asset, not an expense. Therefore it will have little impact on profitability.

The AWS data centres aren't an asset?

I'd have thought comparing funding expanding Amazon's data centre capacity from revenue is very comparable to Tesla building out it's manufacturing capability the same way.

The DCs are assets with 5-20 year lifespans but the servers depreciate over 3-5 years.

Amazon has also been doing a bunch of capital lease shenanigans so they could expand AWS without having to report GAAP losses over the last few years.

Genuinely curious, who sells, rebuilds, or otherwise "end of lifes" a datacenter after 5 years?

The issue is Amazon stock is very expensive when compared with other companies.

Walmart's market cap is ~250B, whereas Amazon is $350B.

Amazon had $100B sales last year, Walmart had $500B.

If Amazon can generate profit at the same rate as Walmart then Amazon needs to get to $700B in sales for that valuation to make sense...

If Amazon double's in value again it would have to have sales representing 10% of US GDP at the same profitability level as Walmart.

Smells like a speculative bubble to me.

Amazon is a much more global/scalable company than Walmart, both now and potentially, so the calculation should be a bit different.

How long should an investor wait to get any ROI on a 20 year old company? (honest question)

1st July 2006 Amazon shares traded for $26, they're currently bouncing around $600.

See here: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#{"range"...

If you want defined returns you can buy amazon bonds today. if you want to try to triple your money in 5 years, well, maybe that'll happen with the stock again. who knows?

LOL. Ballmer say so:

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/ex-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-...

Ballmer isn't conflicted or anything.

Not to mention that MSFT went from $50/share to $30/share under Ballmer's tenure as CEO. Not sure he has any legs to stand on to bash AMZN about being a "real business."

http://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/gates-ballmer-mi...

Also, the iPhone is never going to fly.