Amazon's market cap soared when profits were negative. Amazon was building up reputation, logistics, and customer relations. As far as I can tell, they've been torching all of that long-term value for about the past three years.

That's a huge loss of value.

When were profits negative? AFAIK Amazon.com may lose money but AWS more than makes up for it. Amazon.com is a long game to monopolize retail logistics, which they are just now starting to offer as a service to other retailers, meaning Amazon.com is of less importance.

Amazon was losing money for nearly the first decade of its existence. It was a bit of a laughing stock among the traditional business community: "Lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume!" The loses were considered astronomical at the time; in 2000, it lost over a billion dollars.

The strategy was the right one, though. To put all of that in perspective, in 2018, it earned over 10 billion, and many businesses have since followed the Amazon model.

It's sort of a classic case study in business schools now.

You are conflating Amazon with Amazon.com, and vice versa at your convenience. It's much too sloppy of analysis to sustain a worthy discussion.

I agree a discussion is unwarranted. Your comment is a personal attack with no substance.

(For reference, AWS was founded in 2002, and took some time before it made any sort of dent in much of anything.)

Most recently? In 2022, when Amazon (yes, the entire company) lost about $3 billion during the year.