Reply to post: Have you taken a look at Amazon's 10Ks and 10Qs?

Have you taken a look at Amazon's 10Ks and 10Qs?

These are the documents all public companies are required to file with the SEC quarterly (Q) and annually (K). They paint a picture of a company investing for future. Sure, the company made a loss of over $100 million. But Amazon's stated intent is to not make a profit. On their revenues the loss is within a very small margin of error and covered many time over by their cash reserves. In other words, this is a company managing its finances very precisely and erring on making a small loss [relatively speaking] rather than pay any corporation tax. And this despite making huge capital investments. You can see that Amazon lowered it's cash holdings to 'only' $5bn by an amount almost as much as their investment in kit. Of course this was not the stated reason as a note to the accounts points out that sellers are getting paid earlier.

May be it's because we live in a time when companies no longer make major capital investments for future because it's no longer acceptable to Wall Street who want the money NOW! No software company needs much capital (for hardware) and even those that 'produce' hardware such as Apple offload the expense and risk to Chinese companies like Foxconn.

So it's not normal, and therefore note worthy to an analyst, when a company does something different. However, it's not unusual for new businesses sectors to require unusual investments upfront. Trains, telephones and broadcast TV are examples of sectors that were being funded in far greater amounts than their incomes justified the respective early days. With hindsight these were sensible investments though it probably didn't seem that way at the time.

As for the CIA, my understanding is that they are using AWS kit and software by the container load but in-house. It seems low risk to me. If AWS were to collapse, the CIA already have the hardware and software and would then have ready access to people who were looking for a job. The kit being used is commodity, right? That mean's it's available everywhere, right? So presumably even a government could procure some.