Stop thinking of Amazon as a business. Start thinking of it as tightly managed private VC fund with a shared management structure. As successful startups start spinning off cash, it reinvests in more startups. Most fail, some succeed, and the cycle continues. As long as they do this well, the result is no profit and rapid growth.
Amazon can turn a substantial profit at any moment that they want by just cutting back on this internal reinvestment cycle. The second that they do, that will be a sign that they have internal trouble.
It's fine to invest and take losses if you're a new start up. Amazon is neither new nor a startup. At some point they need to start making money. Otherwise they are just a bucket for fools to throw their money in.
It's shocking they still don't make money. "We will make it up in volume!". Talk about a tech bubble.
An explicit part of their business plan is maximizing free cash flow (not profits).
I'm not sure what funding you think the company is getting from investors. Amazon's stock price could drop through the floor and the biggest issue the company itself would face is the departure of a workforce who take a significant chunk of their compensation in AMZN shares. Unless they're hoping to do another public stock offering the share price is mostly useful as a gauge on Jeff Bezos's net worth.
When the company does want outside funding, it hasn't turned to public stock offerings in recent years. Instead they've secured it by issuing corporate bonds[0]. THERE is somewhere they might have to worry, but as long as their credit rating stays high, they'll find plenty of institutional buyers. Their credit rating is maintained by people who understand that profitability has little to do with how well a large business is doing, and is sometimes an indication of failure to manage funds well (failing to employ depreciation appropriately to minimize tax liability in very successful years, etc.).
[0]:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-02/amazon-se...
If the business does not believe that it has growth opportunities that beat the market, then it should try to generate a profit and return that to investors so that they can look for better opportunities. Conversely if it does believe that it has such growth opportunities, the business should take any free cash that it generates and reinvest that inside of the business. If they are right, they will grow faster than the market. If they are wrong, they will at least acquire resources that can be sold later to recoup at least some of that money.
Amazon in particular pushes a tremendous amount of flexibility to individual business units to pursue growth strategies. As a result they always believe that they have better internal growth opportunities than the market in general. Their rapid growth is a demonstration that they have been right more often than not.
They can switch to generating profit at any time that they want. Just shut down unnecessary areas of the business that are losing money. (Something that they do all of the time whenever they conclude that an idea hasn't worked out.)
However when they take that decision, that will be evidence that senior management has lost confidence in the organization. Which will be a sign of internal problems.
In fact, a few quarters ago, Amazon actually made a profit by accident, because they could not reinvest the money fast enough.
For example, Apple did not pay a dividend until a few years ago and continues to have $200B stockpiled. Is it a failure?
Like it or not, in the last 30-ish years stocks have become just as much for trading as they were for profit sharing/dividend income.
If a stock does not pay a dividend, who cares if it makes a profit?