Wow, that's stark – I hadn't realized that.

I was not familiar with the term "Retained Earnings" – it seems equivalent to "Shareholder Equity" (minus dividends), which is what I had learned in school.

Essentially, GOOG has accumulated $105bn of profit in its lifetime which that has yet to be dispersed to shareholders or invested.

You'd have to think them quite bearish on most currently available opportunities, or quite bullish on not-yet-investable opportunities, or otherwise incapable of effectively deploying capital (eg; due to insufficient human capital). Unless there's something I'm missing.

Yeah, you're missing the US tax code, which means that if there were trying to withdraw or reinvest the profits from overseas, they becompe taxable at corporate tax rate. Much cheaper to borrow more money by issuing bonds etc.

Interesting. Why is AMZN's retained earnings so low then? Do they not make much revenue overseas? Do they struggle to raise bonds at low rates? Are they simply able to deploy tax strategies unavailable to GOOG/FB?

Amazon's operating expenses are significantly larger than Google/FB.

THis means they've never earned a significant amount of cash net of operating expenses

They've also dumped a ton of money into capex, even still I don't think Amazon has ever gotten close to the retained earnings of any of the other four companies.

It's right there in Bezos shareholder letter, the same one he's published every year since 1997. They haven't killed Walmart yet so they have to keep spending to catch up on infrastructure. Google and FB have a comparatively lower need for infrastructure.

They may be aware that Apple has even more retained earnings and when the next big thing comes along they will need every cent to be able to compete.