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The quarterly stock review cycle hasn't restricted Jeff Bezos' ability to innovate and think long term. Investors will tolerate losses for a long time if you have a plan and execute on it consistently. But if you constantly over promise and under deliver that impacts management credibility, which will naturally be reflected in the stock price.

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Sure, and I never said the stock price and innovation are inversely correlated, but I have a feeling that it's a very reasonable idea that optimizing for stock price based on speculation in the free market is an imperfect way to encourage productivity and innovation, and it's worth discussing how the economy could be restructured in a way that did so more perfectly than stock prices.

I don't know what that system would be, and I'm not going to come here and say it's time for a socialist revolution, but perhaps we could make a better free market and we'd all be better off without speculated stock prices being our primary source of motivation.

> speculated stock prices

Speculation drives stock prices to where they ought to be. The whole point is to look for overvalued and undervalued stocks.

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