From The Focus On Washinton Files: Well It Finally happened, Amazon Has Beat Out Microsoft

 

While our own beloved Jim Ewing, up in Washington, is way off under the radar in his earnings with the rest of us mere mortals...not so with the 1%er's way up there in Washington.

Yesterday Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earned $5 billion in one afternoon, 20 minutes actually, when the company's stock price jumped 9.6%.

 Amazon reported an actual profit of $513 million (nearly double the amount expected), and next year Amazon's sales are projected by analysts to be 63% higher than Microsoft's, which USA Today calls "a good illustration of how growth in the sector has moved from hardware, software and chip companies to Internet firms selling goods or advertising online...

 While Bill Gates helped put Seattle area on the map as a U.S. tech hub, Bezos now runs the largest tech company in the State of Washington, by far, in terms of sales."

Amazon's Echo and Alexa devices are believed to be outselling their Kindles (and Alexa will soon make her first appearance on a non-Amazon device). 

 But Amazon attributed their surprise jump in revenue to a 51% annual increase in the "tens of millions" of subscribers paying for their Amazon Prime shipping service (which in San Francisco now even includes delivery from restaurants), as well as a 64% increase from their AWS cloud service, which recently announced a new automated security assessment tool. 
  
Amazon ultimately reported more than twice as much new business as Google and three times as much as Facebook, according to USA Today, which notes that now of all the tech companies, only Apple has more revenue than Amazon, and because of the jump in their stock price, Jeff Bezos is now the fourth-richest person in the world.

But with all that money floating around, Seattle tech blogger Jeff Reifman is now wondering why Amazon's local home delivery vehicles in Seattle seem to be operating with out of state plates.

 Jeff Bezos bears watching in the next couple of years.

I think we are going to see some fascinating things coming from his direction.

 Just how much money is $6 billion? 

• It's enough that Bezos could, for example, go to a sold-out Seattle Mariners game and give every single person in attendance $125,000. (Actually that's kind of a trick example, since the Mariners don't sell out their stadium.)
• It's about the GDP of the African nation of Guinea (with 8 million people). Bezos picked it up in significantly less time than it took me to write this article.
• It's 24 times as much as he paid for The Washington Post. (On average, he made enough to buy the post in 49 seconds.)
• It's enough that he could have bought every Tesla Model S sold last year. Twice.
• It's enough to buy the Dallas Cowboys--plus the New York Yankees and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Warren Buffett admires fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, after all we capitalist need to stick together.