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Employee compensation is heavily tied to stock, especially at the higher levels. You might be right!

What are they going to doing they can't sustain these profits in future quarters?

Massive capex.

Wonder if they wouldn't be better off going private again

Sure. Bezos can just borrow ~250 billion to buy the rest of the company. Seems easy.

A private equity firm would find the money in a heartbeat.

That's absurd. Ignoring the sheer scale of the loan, there's no path for repayment. People don't tend to make loans when they don't expect to get the money back (with interest). Assuming someone lined up to loan Bezos $250 billion and gave him a ridiculously-generous 1% APR and 30-year term, the quarterly payments would be over 2.4 billion, or nearly 5 times as much as they just posted in their best profit ever.

So who exactly do you think has pockets deep enough to fund this 250 billion loan and accountants so terrible they can't see how badly it's going to go?

That would be over 4x bigger than the biggest PE buyout of all time. I'm not so sure it would be that easy.