That doesn't seem controversial. They also develop IoT devices now, of course, but aside from AWS, Amazon is fundamentally a retailer and logistics company. Bac

That doesn't seem controversial. They also develop IoT devices now, of course, but aside from AWS, Amazon is fundamentally a retailer and logistics company. Back when they first came out, this kind of thing was called e-commerce and nobody called them a tech company. That terminology didn't really arise until later. Netflix, of course, was mail order video rental before they entered streaming, and sure, they eventually became known largely for their engineering and how well they scaled the ability to stream enormous amounts of data to huge numbers of consumers, but I don't see what they're doing right now that is any different from Disney and Warners now that those companies also run their own streaming services. The reason they're a "FAANG" that people seem confused about is the acronym was created to describe enormous market cap companies that traded at large multiples of earnings way above what is typical for a blue chip stock. All of these companies had a large ratio of customers to employees as a common attribute, which can in some cases be attributed to the product largely being software-as-a-service that efficiently scales to large numbers of customers, but it was also the case that, other than Apple, they were all fairly young companies. Disney and Warners can't grow like that because they're already huge and have been for a century. That's what distinguishes the growth rate and market cap being out of line with current earnings, not the fact that one makes technology and the other doesn't. Calling yourself a "tech" company eventually became a method of trying to justify multiples like that for your own company. On the successful side, you've got companies like Uber and AirBNB, fundamentally a taxi provider and property rental broker. On the less successful side, WeWork, which was just a basic landlord like that Simons company that owns all the malls or something, and didn't even make software at all, but wanted "tech" company valuations, so they branded that way. Netflix didn't exactly invent streaming, either. Porn studios had video-on-demand served via websites 30 years ago. Netflix certainly did it bigger, but a lot of that is down to it being a lot easier to attract elite engineers and large investors when you're not a porn company.