Not sure if when you say CEO, if you are talking about a CEO with his individual personal stock holdings or for the company itself. If its the former, it feels like Mark Cuban did something of the sort with his Yahoo stock with his own personal holdings in Yahoo.
Amazon should (and still can while there's still time before some major negative social media event) split their website, reviews, search and fulfillment inventory to make it clear what you are getting/who you are buying from.
amazon.com -> the original trusted amazon, fulfilled by amazon with strict inventory management
marketplace.amazon.com -> wild west'e-bay style', 'get what you get and don't get upset' amazon
[Addition based on comment] Or maybe amazon-marketplace.com to further differentiate it. It'd be similar to how Netflix split into netflix.com and dvd.com (although I think they should have branded it netflix-dvd.com for branding purposes).
Actually I like having a unified store...helps provide competition between the marketplace and amazon's own.
Anyway, if you want to avoid marketplace, in the left column, under "Seller", check the box next to "Amazon". (Maybe they could provide this as a permanent setting via preferences.)
This does not work because amazon commingles inventory. So anyone who ships that item into your warehouse could end up providing the actual good your are sold even if the “Seller” is amazon.
My thought is that if you like to see them inline/unified, then you could head directly to amazon-marketplace.com where they are all commingled like they currently are.
Most internet users wont understand the difference if you just differ the urls. A very large chunk dont use/understand the url bar, and just use google search to access websites.
I think what's also interesting is that now that Microsoft is awake with Nadella at the helm and presenting a viable alternative, will Amazon's cloud business start losing marketshare.
If I were say, Procter and Gamble/Clorox (Consumer Staples), Macy's (Consumer Discretionary), Visa/Fedex (E-Commerce), Aetna (Healthcare) if I were going to look at options for cloud, would I host my enterprise on Amazon who is actively trying compete with me and provide the end customer with alternatives to my product/services? Or would I go with a vertical pure play cloud services provider like Microsoft.
Yes, in someways it feels like if Visa claimed that it handles 99.99% of all online retailing and showing revenue numbers based on the entire retail sales transaction and not just on the 1.5% processing fee.
To a certain extent, Amazon's retail presence is 68% Marketplace (from the article). Marketplace is really just a very high scale website plus very high scale order fulfillment which nets an analogous 6%-15% fee for listing, inventory storage and shipping/returns.
And on top of that, what happens when the bricks and mortar store goes out of business and you have nowhere to go when Amazon is not sending it to you and "need it urgently".
Sometimes I shop at the local BestBuy to delay that inevitable day when Amazon is the only thing available.
Actually maybe a well insulated house could be considered a "thermal battery". If you look at the CAISO reports, a significant chunk of the duck curve is related to heating/cooling. If you had a super well insulated house, you could do the heating/cooling during the day.
Instead today, people fire up the AC on overdrive when they get home in the evening to cool/heat the place down/up. What happens if your Nest could just fired it up at 3pm while the sun was still shining.
In fact the opposite is done today to take advantage of early morning peak pricing, commercial buildings cool/heat at 3am to get optimal energy pricing.
I agree with the other commenters on this subthread that buybacks are most often times simply a more tax efficient way of handing back profits to shareholders. I think it's a good thing that companies share profit gains with shareholders. At a certain point, well run and well focused companies can saturate their market domain but still have amazing fundamentals.
You have to ask yourself, particularly as a shareholder but also a member of society, do you want the company to extend into other industries where they could not only be over-extending themselves beyond their core competency but also over-exposing themselves to macro-economics, geo-politics and anti-trust issues.
Do we want all companies to chase monopolies in multiple domains like Amazon? Should Verizon/Comcast/etc. use its monopoly profits from telecom to go after media, then cloud computing and then conquer consumer goods and healthcare or should it just return profits to share holders? If the money goes back to the shareholder, then the shareholder can go find the category leader in those other domains and invest it more wisely.
That said buybacks can definitely be manipulated by some management teams to game their compensation, which is a definitely bad thing.
If we were seeing occasional buybacks obviously tied to company performance, you might have a point.
But realistically we're in a situation where that is not the case, and it's dishonest to make arguments as if it is, or to have a hand-wavy "I guess it's possible it could be bad" throwaway line at the end to dismiss the pretty obvious reality that buybacks are not being used for the purpose you yourself advocate.
Fair point! I'm not an economist by training, just a hobby/armchair economist :).
That said, this economist that some HN'er recommended seems to think earnings are strong and much of the buyback is funded by repatriated money if I understand him correctly.
The current power structure in the US believes tax cuts are always a good thing, since they put money back in the hands of individuals and companies, who will then allocate that money more efficiently than the government. They argue that with their tax breaks, companies will invest in capital improvements and raises for their workers, and individuals will spend more on consumer goods, indirectly benefiting the average worker by creating more demand for such goods.
The reality is companies that get tax breaks now use that money to do stock buybacks which pay off mostly already-wealthy investors, and the prime direct individual beneficiaries of tax cuts also are already-wealthy people, who then use their double windfall (lower tax rate + buyback profits) to throw even more money into playing the markets.
And somehow the promised benefits, of raises for workers, increased demand for the average worker's labor, etc. never actually materialize.
There are good charts floating around showing how corporate behavior has been pretty much entirely driven by the last few decades of tax policy, primarily the reduction of corporate and top individual rates, and how the changes in behavior have almost universally made economic inequality in the US much much worse than it previously was (see, for example, ballooning executive compensation while average workers' wages are stagnant or even lower than previously when adjusted for inflation, the complete decoupling of wages from productivity, etc. etc.).
More fair points. And, yes at the individual level, I agree, a higher wage, trickle up approach seems better/fairer than a trickle down approach.
However, at the macro level, the environmentalist in me worries, at the extreme end if wealth really was fully distributed and everyone was living like Richard Branson, Imelda Marcos, etc. with multiple houses in every city (each with a 4 bedroom layout, TVs and wet bar in every room and an SUV in every garage), a yacht, a private jet guzzles premium fuel and a private island, the environmental ramifications would be disastrous.
You seem to be setting up a false dichotomy where the only options are the status quo, or your extreme hypothetical.
There are other options. Some countries use taxation policy to try to set a floor through which nobody is allowed to fall, and as a side effect also limit the ceiling of how high up someone can be on the wealth continuum. Why isn't the "environmentalist" in you familiar with this idea?
The environmentalist in me is thinking a single billionaire's carbon impact is probably lower than a 1,000 millionaire's carbon impact. A single billionaire (say Warren Buffet) has a consumption of probably $200,000 a year with the remainder held in investments. A 1,000 millionaire's consumption is probably also $100,000 a year, with the remainder held in investments. So the 1,000 millionaires have basically about 500x the environmental impact than a single billionaire.
Buybacks, in practice, are not good for investors. They are basically always abused by management to defraud investors. I'm not sure why people focus on the theory of buy backs and not the actual application. Study the history of how corporations like Cisco actually use buybacks, it is best described as "shareholder rape."[1]
There is likely some truth to this as it encourages new housing stock to be built. I also suspect that it does lead to a more sustainable long term growth that's less likely to have major sell offs since owners will hold onto their property to maintain their tax advantage. I openly wonder if this is the reason that California housing, particularly in the Bay Area, did not implode during the dotcom bubble.
As a side note, I've often pondered what would have the outcome if Subway had 'leaned in' and actually promoted its "50% chicken-50% soy but tastes the same as 100% chicken" as an environmentally sustainable and healthier option instead of trying to hide it and then getting caught.
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Mark-Cuban-save-his-wealth-fro...