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Not really, because your re-investments could be profit-destroying. If you earn 100 dollars of profit and gave to investors, the investors now have $100. If y

• jacquesm 12y ago
  Think of it as endless stockdividends, so every profit is turned into money that fuels further growth of the machine without having to hit anybody up for capital. As long as there is growth plow the profits back into the engine. Once the growth stops (you'd have to wonder what the implications of that alone would be, I'm not sure I can quite envision how large a vertically integrated company that would run into the limits of geographical expansion would be, planet wide perhaps?) you can start thinking about dividends. Until then the best investment is to re-invest because that is where ultimately you'll make the highest ROI. It's the longest of long bets, and since Bezos / Amazon is betting on itself there is a large number of ways in which he can affect the outcome. If he would invest his profits after dividend into some other company (after all, just letting it lay around would be very wasteful) he's likely not get as much influence and not as high an eventual ROI. It's a very smart long term strategy.
• SilasX 12y ago
  Yes, in the future you might not be profitable. In the year that you turned a profit, you turned a profit, even if you decided not to pay it out as a dividend.