It seems to me that Amazon or any large e-commerce company could duplicate every aspect of Wish's business for a tiny fraction of the $10 billion they offered.

It seems to me that Amazon or any large e-commerce company could duplicate every aspect of Wish's business for a tiny fraction of the $10 billion they offered. I have no personal knowledge, but I'm going to offer 3 theories on what's really going on: (a) Perhaps Wish is undergoing exponential growth and there's no way Amazon can catch up if they did it themselves. This is why Microsoft paid a fortune to acquire Hotmail rather than just creating their own free email service. (The $400 million that Microsoft paid seemed absurdly crazy at the time. That's million, not billion. How quaint the web was.) (b) Not all decisions are driven by hard reasoning about money and numbers. Executives enjoy schmoozing, hobnobbing, and doing "big deals". Would you rather be the worker-bee executive who spends the next 2 years and $30 million creating a division that duplicates Wish's business model or be the bigwig who orchestrated a ten billion dollar deal in 3 months? It's not your money after all. (c) Accounting rules vastly favor investing in other companies rather than spending it internally. This is nicely explained in an old article by John Walker, founder of Autodesk: "Many people think that because Autodesk has $140 million squirreled away, we can use that money free of constraints. But that isn't how it works. Regardless of how prudent you've been piling up money over the years, the moment you spend any of it in your business, it's just as if you increased your day to day operating budget. That means rising expenses without an increase in sales, and that translates into . . . falling margins. About the only thing you can do with the money that doesn't cause margins to fall, other than giving it back in dividends, is investing it in other companies. When you make an investment, that's carried on the books as capital. As long as you don't have to write the investment off, it doesn't affect your operating results." Or maybe some combination of (a), (b), and (c) above.