Global equity markets, commodities, and cryptocurrencies all crashed on Black Monday 2.0, and investors are worried about the unabated sell-off. Against this backdrop, social media tapped into sagacious comments from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the aftermath of the 2000 dotcom bubble burst to draw some encouragement.
What Happened: When Amazon shares were annihilated along with the other tech stocks in 2000, Bezos strived to calm the agitated shareholders through his letter to them. Excerpts of the letter that Bloomberg journalist Jon Erlichman shared showed the billionaire reeling off Amazon’s achievements in fiscal year 2000. “Our shares are down more than 80% from when I wrote you last year. Nevertheless, by almost any measure, Amazon.com the company is in a stronger position now than at any time in its past,” he said.
To substantiate his claim, he noted that Amazon’s customer count increased from 14 million to 20 million between 1999 and 2000, sales climbed from over 68% to $2.76 billion, pro forma operating loss narrowed by 6% and average spend per customer rose 19%, among other things.
Bezos tapped into the wisdom of Benjamin Graham, who is widely called the father of value investing. The Amazon founder quoting Graham said the stock market is like a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term,
“Clearly there was a lot of voting going on in the boom year of '99—and much less weighing,” Bezos said.
“We're a company that wants to be weighed, and over time, we will be—over the long term, all companies are. In the meantime, we have our heads down working to build heavier and heavier company,” he added.
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Why It’s Important: On Monday, Amazon shares fell a little over 4%, less than what most of its mega-cap tech peers lost. Bezos is not part of the active management team of Amazon now and serves as chairman of the board, and the e-commerce giant is led by his successor Andy Jassy.
True to what Bezos said, Amazon has now grown as a heavier company. The second-quarter results released last week showed the top line growing to $147.98 billion and earnings coming in at $1.26 per share. Apart from the core e-commerce business, the company has diversified its operations to include a thriving cloud computing business called AWS, giving it exposure to the hot-and-happening artificial intelligence technology.
From the post-dotcom bubble burst bottom of a split-adjusted 30 cents per share (split-adjusted price), the stock has risen to $161.02, a gain of about 54,000%.
The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, an exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500 Index, ended Monday’s session down 2.91% at $517.38, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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