And still a price/earnings ratio over 70, and no dividend in sight.

What exactly to people imagine they're buying when they plunk down money for shares in this company?

Non-speculators believe Amazon can increase prices by 1% and make a killing.

They imagine they're buying into a company that will start paying dividends once it stops seeing further areas of massive growth.

But for right now, they're quite content for Amazon to be e.g. reinvesting its profit into things like its own last-mile delivery service, for starters.

Once Amazon becomes more popular than UPS, Kroger, Walgreens, and probably five other companies in their respective markets, then it'll be time to open the dividends tap. But that doing it now would be throwing away money, sacrificing future profit for present.

I'm not saying I do or don't think Amazon is going to succeed in these things, but I do think that is absolutely what people invested in Amazon believe they're buying.

A future monopoly that can raise prices at will. They're making a bet that government will not function.

Long-term capital gains?

Watching Amazon, Twitter and Meta these last few days has almost given me "death by Schadenfreude".

Unfortunately, buying anything from Amazon as a retail customer feels like playing a game of roulette these days.

Ah I remember the good old days when everyone hated Walmart. And liked Amazon and Google.

I agree. And yet I still took this story as a reminder to buy some AAA rechargeable batteries.

They were double the price at my local big-box/hardware store.

I am pretty convinced Amazon the stock is going to be a big bargain within the next couple of weeks. At somewhere around $700-800B it’s going to be less than intrinsic. These are global enterprises with significant TAM in a world where more than half of the population will experience significant increase in standard of living in the next decade or two. All they have to do is hold market leaderships as monopolies.

Protectionism will likely prevent that.

Amazon has largely become Chinese crap in American warehouses

To be fair, that's also true for Walmart and co.