Copious free-cash-flow every quarter is why software companies generally have higher valuations than traditional industries and why it was novel that Amazon, which is not obviously a software company, behaves as one financially.
Famously Warren buffet.
Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.
It’s almost certainly, in the case of Amazon, data centers and fulfillment centers and trucks and planes and heavy equipment.
Unfortunately, you are probably viewed as a liquid asset by your management.
What a rotten world we live in
However, most of the rest of the industry simply collectively decided that profits don't matter. Most companies of past 10-15 years stopped caring about profits, and only talk about revenue. The are now only two goals in mind:
- survive long enough on unlimited investor money to be sold to the highest bidder and be immediately shutdown
- survive long enough on unlimited investor money to try and corner a market through investor-subdidized price dumping and near-illegal business practices, and then maybe look at how to get some of the lost money back, maybe
AMZN started to become profitable in 2021.[1] By 2023, it was very profitable. $17 billion in Q1 2025.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...
Amazon started to be very profitable because they couldn’t reinvest all that money into growing the business in a meaningful way. The timing aligning with when they stopped their Covid-buildout because sales behavior returned to in-store, they started scaling back the billions a year they wasted on Alexa, and started scaling back various moonshot ideas like Amazon Go stores.
So, now that they have a defacto monopoly they will jack up prices and profit from companies being slow to move out. IBM did the same thing.
Previously (95 points, 2021, 105 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661261
aaronbrethorst•6mo ago
turnsout•6mo ago
adventured•6mo ago
$71 billion in operating income is so exceptional only seven other companies in history have gotten that large: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Facebook, Exxon and Aramco (if you count them as a company). And importantly, that $71 billion is rapidly expanding - it has doubled just since fiscal 2023. In 15 months sales increased $76 billion and op income increased by $35 billion.
The spigot is flowing. $100b in op income is likely not far away.
turnsout•6mo ago