supported by an annual payment that includes all sorts of fun stuff:
movies, music, and livestreams of NFL games. My bet is Amazon buys
the rights to broadcast March Madness or the Super Bowl to juice their
Prime membership... as they can.
Race to a Trillion
The circle is now complete. Amazon now has all the pieces in place for
zero-click ordering—AI, purchase history, warehouses within twenty
miles of 45 percent of the U.S. population, millions of SKUs, voice
receptors in the wealthiest American households (Alexa), ownership of
the largest cloud/big data service, 460 (soon thousands) brick-and-
mortar stores, and the world’s most trusted consumer brand.
That is why Amazon will be the first $1 trillion market cap
company.
Now, you may ask: What about Apple and Uber? Since 2008, those
two companies have created more shareholder value than any other
public or private firm. The key to their success was the iPhone and
GPS ordering and tracking—and that’s very different from Amazon’s
strategy, right?
Wrong. Their secret sauce was much more mundane:
breakthrough stores for Apple and reduced friction for Uber. It’s not
the GPS tracking illuminating where Javier and his Lincoln MKS are,
but your ability to bomb out of the car/store without the friction of
paying. That puts both companies on the same playing field as
Amazon—and Amazon knows the rules of that game far better than the
other two companies.
As Bezos said in his recent letter to stockholders, “At Amazon,
we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning
for many years now.”^97 How many years? If Amazon tests an AI-like
offering anticipating all your retail needs—sending stuff automatically
and calibrating based on what you send back or edit via voice (“Alexa,
more Rogaine and less sunblock”)—the test will register an Amazonian
increase in spending per household. The stock will become antigravity
matter and triple to a trillion dollars in value. Facebook and Google