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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions that this is a Bezos-only deal, no Amazon involvement.

Come now, certainly you don't believe that. Capital structure is an integral piece of corporate strategy as is board construction.

Bezos has liquidated so much AMZN stock he doesn't need AMZN's balance sheet for a piddly $250mm transaction. He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit. The last I checked, AMZN still had an infinite PE.

By keeping WaPo remote he can at least create the appearance that AMZN is corporately neutral for whatever news platform ideas AMZN pursues.

This "amazon can't turn a profit" meme needs to die. They take in a ton of money. Just because they immediately turn around and spend it on the next cool project they've got happening doesnt mean they are a failing business. If their goal was to make the balance sheet look pretty, they could stop funding the production of original content for a couple of quarters, or stop investing in robotic fulfillment centres, or whatever else they are spending millions on. It would look like a profit then, but where's the fun in that?

Profit is for suckers. They focus on free cash flow.

Edit: Link: http://daslee.me/reading-jeff-bezos

> He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit.

You mean like the $645MM profit they made in 2008, the $902MM profit they made in 2009, the $1.15BN profit in 2010, or $631MM profit in 2011?

Or is all that nullified by the $39MM loss in 2012 (due to LivingSocial)?

considering they have a market cap of 137 billion, those are really tiny profits. Obviously the strategy at Amazon is to grow revenues and invest in the business, but that doesn't mean the parent is wrong. Amazon has essentially had no profit to speak of compared with their market cap over their entire company life. People investing in them have done so under the hope/expectation that once they reach their goal of ??? (world domination maybe?) the profits will be really big. That or they are just hoping a greater fool will buy their shares higher at some point in the future.

There was a very interessting article once (shame on me that I didn't bookmark it...) comparing the strategy of Apple and Amazon. Main point was that Amazon pursues a low (zero?) margin strategy.

Guess that's what commerce should be about, cash instead of margin. Aldi, a pretty big german discounter of grocceries, works that way and became huge. That they are loosing right now against "new" entrants is a different thing.

But having seen time and again profitable companies struggle in time of crisis simply because they run out of cash, I'd rather back a company like Amazon.

Was this the article that you were talking about?

http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins

Yes, exactly that one! Thanks!

Growth is all that typically matters in the stock market. Investors really want to see this kind of steady increase in stock price, despite the difficult economic environment.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=A...

Unless you have some blue chip giving out dividends, no one cares much about profit.

Given how little tax they pay in the UK, I'm surprised it's not higher.

I'm not saying there will never be any tie-in, but it's perfectly reasonable to expect that AMZN <> WAPO will be similar to Apple <> Pixar when Steve Jobs owned both. Some tie-ins for those who know, but not some massive concerted effort as you implied.

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