ultraluminous

Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's exactly the original AWS value prop, run a hybrid private/cloud environment and extend to the cloud when needed.

Your situation might not be extremely rarefied, but I don't think you grasp the immensely insurmountable advantage you have in this scenario.

If you went to college voluntarily and did not care about neither the monetary constraints nor the opportunity costs, then sure that's a vacation. I suspect pretty much anything can be framed as such under those circumstances. For most people, this is not actually a realistic option.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that those "markets" are fundamentally distorted by the in-elasticity of demand. People generally need education and healthcare.

Coincidentally, that's the way almost all of the non-US world chooses to look at it.

which is what happened to Microsoft, stagnating its stock for ~15 years

Microsoft stock ticker - https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT

The longest "stagnant" period is directly after the dotcom bust and up to 2007. In that period the stock appreciated by ~10%. Over the following decade it appreciated by ~150%. Not quite the dramatic hockeystick growth curve startup folk like to see, but pretty reasonable for a company already 30 years old at that point. Either way, the quote above has no basis in reality.