I worked on a backend service for Echo for a bit so was exposed to the internal stuff. There are a ton of people behind this project, as in, lots of things were

I worked on a backend service for Echo for a bit so was exposed to the internal stuff. There are a ton of people behind this project, as in, lots of things were done manually. There is a PM for "dog facts", for example. He makes at least 250k in total comp per year. His cost to the company is at least about the same (for simplicity), so 250k/year is spent just on dog facts (and I'm guessing some other fact categories). 10B would then pay for 5000 employees for 8 years (echo was released in 2004). My impression is that there were more than 5000 people working on Alexa between devs, QA, PMs, TPMs, managers, designers, etc, so I'm not surprised by $10B at all. In fact, it seems low after doing the calculation above, but people do switch projects or are shared so maybe it just seemed like that to me.