That's a possibility, yes, but I think Amazon's success is too extreme a case for an accident to be the most likely explanation. If it was merely a "decent" suc

That's a possibility, yes, but I think Amazon's success is too extreme a case for an accident to be the most likely explanation. If it was merely a "decent" success or a "pretty good" success, then yeah, but it's many orders of magnitude beyond that, in a very cutthroat industry. To get to this point, the company has had to consistently make aggressive, unintuitive, massively beneficial decisions, many dozens of times per year over several decades. Imagine Lebron James — Could he just be lucky every play he goes out onto the court? It's possible. But I'd say the more likely explanation is he knows what he's doing. He's got a fundamental understanding, an underlying theory, and a set of skills that map well to reality and give him an edge that contributes to his success. So does Amazon.