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This is such a strange comment to me. Amazon is not even the largest retailer in the US (that’s Walmart). It’s the largest e-commerce retailer, but at 40% share

This is such a strange comment to me. Amazon is not even the largest retailer in the US (that’s Walmart). It’s the largest e-commerce retailer, but at 40% share there are plenty of other businesses here. Amazon IPOd in 1997, three years after being founded, when it still only sold books - I’m not aware of any VCs that are in the habit of buying shares in public companies. And finally, it’s really weird to call investment by a business, something that the tax code and public policy explicitly encourages, a “tax avoidance strategy to turn profits into capital”.

Retric 5y ago
Owning all online retail was hardly their initial business. What’s their share of online book sales over time? They of course continued to sell stock to fund further investments in other business, but they also funneled “operating expenses” into long term capital. AWS is a one such example, which hides actual profit margins via investments in software. The IRS has a clear line in the sand when buying land, but R&D gets tricky.