I used to work for a strapping start-up. Our competition had a lot more money, and people than us... but it didn't really matter because we were smarter in how we approached building the product.

The future of eCommerce is going to be very heavily dependent on AI & robots. Product Suggestions > inventory management > ware house > packing > delivering.

AI makes your customers buy more, and robots make delivering it cheaper.

As good as Amazon is at creating this infrastructure, google has demonstrated a mastery in AI, and they're purchasing every robot company around. The competition is on, and I wouldn't count them out.

Google is much more forward looking, looking for big changes, like self driving cars. I can see google taking over more markets like they did with search. "more wood behind fewer arrows" was the saying.

Amazon is much more broad, if Amazon has something, they'll rent it to you.

The future of EVERYTHING is going to be very reliant on AI and robots. My view is that the last 20 years have been the Internet revolution. The next 20 are all about AI and robotic automation. Both disciplines have existed for a long time, but they've hit a tipping point where price and effectiveness are putting them within reach of total ubiquity.

a bit like Xerox and its PARC

I know for myself, my motivation to get capital (profits) is so I can build things that improve decision making, increase longevity and in the end expand knowledge worldwide. Perhaps Bezos has motivations that are along the same lines and this is how he is achieving them.

Because stock is a claim against the assets in the event of dissolution, so it should be valuable as long as the company is expected to have a positive net worth.

Dividends are simply a mechanism allowing stockholders to realize value prior to dissolution. Of course, so is simply selling stock.

Further, if Amazon runs out of good opportunities to funnel operating returns into expansion, then it would make sense to start returning some via dividends, its just that its not there yet and that situation isn't even apparent on the horizon -- its not that they'll never pay dividends, its just that it doesn't seem to be the optimum strategy for the foreseeable future.

  stock is a claim against the assets in the event of dissolution

But that's because as long as a corporation is solvent, stockholders either expect that it will have greater net value in the future or can find someone else who thinks that, making holding or selling the stock preferable to dissolution. But its the claim against assets in the event of dissolution that supports all that.

I mean there are large monster e-commerce giants in other nations, it is a very real possibility that Amazon will have to battle with some company at scale who is also in the razor sharp margin mindframe.

Its not impossible to imagine a world where amazon gets into a war with an Asian e-commerce giant for domination of the worlds e-commerce needs. If this does come to fruition this battle will probably not be resolved until 2020 ish time frame... so its a real possibility that amazon could be in business for 30 years, never return a profit to its investors, and NOT end up ever ruling ecommerce.

Amazon is worth money right now. Just like a lawn mower doesn't turn a profit on its own, but it is still worth something.

In the long term view, which Amazon definitely takes, this current process is just there to fund the final business. Which is providing infrastructure. It uses its current operations as a way to fund the build out of that infrastructure. The future of Amazon, in my opinion, is not selling books etc, but providing someone with the infrastructure to sell books. Its using its current book sales etc to fund that build out.

I dont think Amazon is taking a bad approach but, realistically feel Amazon is not going to produce any other return for its investors for the next ten years until it completely dominates the world market. Couple this with the fact that Amazon is not guaranteed to ever actually completely dominate the world market... its just unusual for a company to never return a profit after 20 years of business and investors are still hungry for the stock.

By that definition, literally every investment would be a Ponzi scheme. A savings account would be a Ponzi scheme.

Only the ones that you only expect to turn a dime on by finding a bigger fool to buy it from you. If the investment is something that returns money to you (for example, dividends), you're not expecting to make money by selling it for more. You're expecting to make money because you own a small piece of a business that makes money for its shareholders. I have a number of investments that I expect I will never sell (or at least, am not hoping to sell for more that I paid for it); I'm very happy just being given a nice share of the profits every year.

These investments do not require anyone else to buy in, ever; hardly a Ponzi scheme.

Many investments do not earn dividends, including ones that are widely considered to not be Ponzi schemes.

Essentially, there's a philosophy among some CEOs that at current tax rates profitability is something to be avoided, but a healthy EBITDA and reinvesting the capex is the way to increase the shareholder value. The voluntary nature of capital gains tax makes stock buybacks or busines reivestment a more efficient mechanism of delivering value to shareholders.

It's certainly possible amazon could end failing and the stock would end be worthing much less than expected. It seems unlikely the name brand, market capture, datacenter and distribution facilities, etc would not end up with amazon being acquired by a walmart or something ala AOL/TW.

Couple that with a nice PR machine ( can't understate the value of people like PMarca writing about how amazing they are ) and you've got a way to reliably grow your portfolio.

Amazon is completely different from that, no? A tremendous amount of their value is in intangibles that produce revenue, rather than have intrinsic value. This is fine when you say "I want to own a piece of that revenue stream for the future profits", but if Amazon by choice will never produce net profits from that stream... do you see what I'm getting at? A goose that lays golden eggs has no value if the eggs are never sold and simply hatched.

The bet that investors are making is that at some point the revenues and cash flow will be so huge that Amazon won't know what to do with them and at that point they will start showing a profit and perhaps even pay a dividend. It's not entirely unreasonable. Even Apple finally started paying a dividend once they got to 100 billion or so in the bank.

Noticing that Amazon only has 1% of the retail market is pretty crazy. the potential opportunity they have is staggering. It's not unreasonable to think at some point their will be profits to be had.

hedging

diversification

lottery tickets on bezos owning a significant fraction of world commerce