According to this economic analysis of Amazon’s business model by Benedict Evans, the answer is “not yet” … because Jeff Bezos has adopted a “closed-loop” strategy of re-investing all of Amazon’s revenues back into his company in order “to capture a larger and larger share of the future of commerce.” Here is one revealing excerpt from Ben Evans’s essay (with thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer and Jeff Bezos for the diagram):
So, we have dozens of separate businesses within Amazon, and over two million third party seller accounts, all sitting on top of the Amazon fulfillment and commerce platform. Some of them are mature and profitable, and some are not. And someone at Amazon has the job of making sure that each quarter, this nets out to as close to zero as possible, at least as far as net income goes. That is, the problem with net income is that all it tells us is that every quarter, Amazon spends whatever’s left over to get the number to zero or thereabouts … If you listen closely, Amazon itself tells us this. The image below comes straight from Amazon — originally it was a napkin sketch by Jeff Bezos. Note that there’s no arrow pointing outwards labeled ‘take profits.’ This is a closed loop.
prior probability 