Amazon's quarterly reports have all been good so far (Q3 2022 is the latest). Sales are up 15% YoY, and they are profitable.
Some of their investments are boat anchors pulling the companies profits down.
Amazon in particular has a longstanding problem of ops costs rising quickly giving the constant potential to eat into profit margins. If a company does not have a path to profitability, at the scale to justify it's market cap, it will continue to lose investor money.
TL:DR; - reducing an earnings report to "sales grew, all good" is wildly misleading.
In relative terms, Apple is in first place for the largest market cap in the world of any company, and Amazon is in fifth place.
They're totally fine.
Think of it this way: Amazon is still more than twice as valuable now as it was 5 years ago. Short-term investors will live by the sword or die by the sword, but long-term investors are fine.
Well, and also some of the employees there, regardless of their length of service. This whole thread is more from the POV of the tech workers getting laid off than investment performance.
This doesn't mean that it's all downside for employees though. Amazon grew a huge business and paid their corporate employees top of market with huge upside over the last 20 years due to their phenomenal growth. It was a very good deal for those who worked in Amazon corporate over the last 20 years—a lot of people got richer than their parents ever could have gotten in the previous generation of more stable corporate jobs.
But make no mistake, Amazon is not a magic pot of gold, they still have a P&L like any other company. 17,000 employees are not cheap. Amazon grew from 800k employess to 1.3m and then 1.6m at the end of 2019, 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic. It is to be expected that their forecasts were not completely accurate in light of the generational event and tech sea change that the pandemic brought. The fact that people are scandalized by this is indicative of how insane the 12-year bull run for tech really was.