Yesterday, we summarized all that was wrong in Amazon's worst quarter in history [2] where apparently one can no longer "make up for negative profits with volume."
Here is another way of deconstructing Amazon's love-hate relationship with profitability: in all of its 20+ year history, Amazon has generated under $2 billion in Net Income. The offset? Jeff Bezos' net worth, which according to Bloomberg [3] is about $30 billion (that was the number in April, when Bezos had lost a whopping $6.5 billion due to the collapse of AMZN, by now the number is surely far lower making Bezos the biggest billionaire loser in 2014). Still, for indicative purposes, the data is good enough.
In short: this is what Jeff Bezos' value creation looks like (one does wonders if Amazon has purposefully been a perennial "bottom-line loser" for decades simply to avoid paying taxes [4]).
[5]
And as a bonus chart, this from the WSJ:
[6]
Inspired by @ReutersJamie [7] [7]
