Staggering numbers indeed. They do seem to be under a lot more scrutiny than others, whether it be political or from the FTC; their attempt to buy a GIF company for 500m was blocked, yet Microsoft looks set to swallow up one of the biggest games companies in the world for 50bn+.

Have you seen Money Heist, where the crims break into the Mint in order to run the presses for a couple of weeks?

That's like Amazon 3P (Marketplace), but with Amazon running the presses 52 weeks a year such that it's the most profitable part of the business. My guess is TS bought Amazon after twigging this. As with the crims in Money Heist though, the big risk is probably from "The Authorities" stepping in to interrupt the plan, hence perhaps why Amazon seems to go out of its way to downplay the vast, monopolistic machine that 3P has become.

EDIT: good point made above about others seeking to disintermediate Amazon themselves. Prime is a very big deal (powerful tool) here though.

One of the things I like about investment markets is how the prevailing mood (informed by recency & availability biases) helps shape the response of investors to new information/data: Ben Graham's "Mr Market", erratically swinging between optimism and pessimism. Hence, securities pricing depends on both the actually data itself and the prevailing mood "filter" through which investors view that data. The best investment/trading opportunities come when a (very) large gap opens up between current popular perception and the underlying reality, giving rise to large mispricings. Market's can be pretty inefficient in the short term, en route to long term efficiency.

Certainly at present we're seeing Mr Market's former irrational optimism diminish somewhat. Any perceived misstep in quarterly numbers will see a stock taken behind the woodshed, and if (when) a general growth slowdown plays out we'll see more of this. For long term investors, this should be welcome news, particularly if the mood swings from optimism to full-blown pessimism, materially lowering valuation multiples thereby providing greater scope for more attractive long term returns.

Sometimes I test my own understanding of an investment case by taking a pen and paper and writing a few sentences on what a company or product is actually "about".

When it come to the "metaverse" I literally have no idea what it actually is....I could not write it down.

Pretty sure the only reason we've even heard of that word is that Zuck needed to "put a dead cat on the table" after the Frances Haugen whistleblower "Facebook papers" stuff came out. Amazingly, it seems to have worked too. It's practically like if the tobacco companies had managed to completely sidestep revelations that they knew smoking was harmful to their customers by simply rebranding their product from "cigarettes" to "unicorn sticks" or something.