Donald Trump wipes $5.7bn off the value of Amazon with single tweet

independent.co.uk

10 points·elmar··8 comments

The tweet in question: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/89776304922608435...

Quoting: "Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!"

Would there be any merit to this claim if it were said by anybody else?

An unfair advantage that Amazon and many other online retailers have is they either do not collect and pay sales tax at all, or they only selectively do it (e.g., only in states where they have a physical presence such as a warehouse and can't get away with it).

On the other hand the only way to make money at Walmart is to work there. Amazon lets people set up shop or use some pretty serious computing power to set up website or on-line stores or use the servers for their "big data" problems.

Is there a parallel here to what Putin has done to Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky) ?

For Trump, Bezos represents a powerful potential rich adversary and owner of Washington Post.

The $5.7bn is only about 1~1.5% of market cap for Amazon and about 0.5% of the stock price. I would not be surprised if Pres. Trumps tweet had some effect but AMZN is coming of its all time high of a little over $1000 and has been dropping for a few days.

Couldn't Trump's Twitter antics allow a tremendous amount of profiteering through insider trading, and aren't Congress and the President basically immune from insider trading laws?

Planet Money(POD cast/NPR) have done it. I don't believe they made any money/trade just yet. botus: Bot of the U.S.

I do not really want to upvote this.

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