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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Well, yes. People do like to get unearned money. And, in the long run, unless Amazon earns money, the stockholders won't get unearned money. But I'm not quite sure of your point here. Are you predicting a hostile takeover? Or are you predicting that the stock will go down? Or that Amazon will become bankrupt?
If its that last one, I would point out that eventually, even generally successful companies do go through time of financial distress. Sometimes this greatly weakens or destroys them, but you can't count on that.
All major US airlines (Northwest, TWA, US Air, American, United, Delta) have gone bankrupt in the past fifteen years. This was bad for the stockholders, but the underlying business functions (for example, the old Northwest Orient Tokyo hub now run by Delta) still exist, either independently or as part of another company. Something similar is true for once-bankrupt giants like IBM and GM.
I'd think, or hope, we'd all agree that what makes for a great airline isn't stockholder value, but safety. It's harder to say what makes for a great mobile-reading vendor, but, as a reader, I don't see Amazon's financial weaknesses as a big issue. Regardless of whether Amazon makes money, and regardless of whether stockholders one day get zeroed-out, Amazon's Kindle and eBook business will retain a tremendous market share for the foreseeable future.
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My point is that a strategy of constantly rolling everything back into the company will eventually be frowned on by investors, making it hard to secure more money from investors, i.e. stock prices will go down. When that cut off point comes varies depending on if the investors can see an end point or not. I'm not big on running a company for "shareholder value" (a new buzz word that can have many meanings) but for long term success, a company has to have balance.
I will point out that return on investment is _not_ unearned money, any more than the interest that one earns on bonds or savings accounts is unearned money.