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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

Amazon always has and continues to invest internally to expand e.g., new AWS regions, warehouse automation through robotics most of which are extremely capital intensive. Though your observation is right that MGM acquisition does make sense for Amazon because they OK to pay a premium to fast-track expanding their media business.

The way I see it, Amazon, as a growth machine, keeps its growth options (organic/inorganic) open and when sees an opportunity for inorganic growth they will go for it. The most recent example being their acquisition of Whole Foods. They were anyway investing in growing their brick-and-mortar presence and opportunistically acquired Whole Foods to fast-track it.

Relatedly, Amazon has to be one of the most diverse corporations ever. From AWS to media studio. Which other corporations come close?

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Eastern companies like yamaha and hyaundai. dirtbikes to pianos, cars to housing

That was my first thought, specifically the South Korean Chaebols like Samsung

> dirtbikes to pianos

Yamaha's logo is three tuning forks. Always cracks me up seeing that on a dirtbike.

Motorcycles have forks too, but if they resonate at 440 Hz you have got issues...

Good point. The Korean Chaebol [1] is all about the conglomerate.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

>Relatedly, Amazon has to be one of the most diverse corporations ever.

That is the exact problem Steve Yegge described [1]. Americans has a world view that equals to America. Amazon doesn't even compare with Samsung in vertical integration.

And in terms of diversity, it doesn't even need to be Korea Chaebol, dozens of other East Asia conglomerate are way more diverse than Amazon.

[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/hurricane-china-how-to-prepar...

I agree, but...

2021 Amazon has AWS, which is hugely cash generative... hence the growing cash balance. They can't invest faster than it accumulates. Financially, they're like Apple, Google, Etc. now.

Also, "capital intensive" is relative. Warehouse's investment numbers tend to be publicized, because politics. A big one is $200m, and that's a "media story" number which may be higher than the real, "capital investment" amount.

Company valuations are one thing, but $10bn is a lot of capital. It's hard to actually invest that much. That's why the big software companies have so much of the damn stuff.

Diversifying used to be the norm (eg Thorn EMI, Virgin, etc). It’s more of a modern trend to specialise in one field.

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