It's a fraction with a numerator and denominator. The demoniator can be 0.00001 sometimes. Any PE over 50 or so is effectively meaningless, everyone in finance knows to just ignore them at look at better valuation metrics.

Also there's a pretty good argument that the PE is a useless ratio that should be actively ignored, they haven't correlated strongly with anything in like 20 years.

How does that work, accounting-wise? Isn't re-invested capital coming out of profits by definition? Otherwise a company could just "re-invest" all their would-be profit into gold (or some other store of value) and claim to have made zero profit. I don't think the IRS would be too happy about that.

They basically are.