The reason their stock is valued so much is partly because if he wanted/needed to, Bezos could wake up one day and cut all programs focused on expansion and return the saved costs / new profits as dividends. The reason this doesn't happen is that the money is (thought to be) better spent on increasing the size of the business. There's no reason other companies couldn't do this, although I expect the main limit to this strategy is the extent to which you can productively reinvest capital. This is a function of foresight/luck (e.g. branching into AWS) but also of the market you're in: to what extent do you begin to experience diminishing returns as you spend more money on improving your product? I think that with logistics, as with Amazon and e.g. Walmart, the returns diminish very slowly, or even increase with money spent (economies of scale).

Here's an example of a company that generates cash but only recently is in the safe-ish territory:

https://finance.google.com/finance?q=LLNW

(Not that I think they are emulating Amazon, mind you, just making the point that you can have a going concern, and still get delisted.)

More broadly, unless you have an amazing business, you probably shouldn't emulate Amazon (or Google, or FB, or any other business that is depending on free cash flow to fund R&D as opposed to generating profits).

that's only dangerous until the stock does a reverse split.

It's also incorrect to say that AMZN "makes buttloads of money", with sub-1 EPS[1] at a nearly $1,000 share price.

[1] https://finance.google.co.uk/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&fstype=...

It's more just like "woah we're hip smart tech bros we need to fix the stock market!" even though none of their claims really have any merit.

IPOs are still stupid for a lot of reasons, but stratifying shareholders (why is the answer to everything from the Valley always more stratification?) is neither here nor there.