Bezos Said Something Wild in 2018… Now Amazon’s Spending $58B to Make Sure It Never Comes True

By Stocks News   |   2 weeks ago   |   Stock Market News
Bezos Said Something Wild in 2018… Now Amazon’s Spending $58B to Make Sure It Never Comes True

In 2018, Jeff Bezos stood in front of Amazon employees and said something that would’ve gotten most CEOs quietly escorted out by PR. His words? “Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt.”

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No, he wasn’t pulling an Elon and hinting at some cryptic meltdown. He was making a point: even giants fall… not because of one big mistake, but because they get comfortable, stop innovating, and start believing their own hype. (See: Sears, Kodak, Blockbuster... basically the high school yearbook of corporate overconfidence.)

Bezos’s message was simple: obsess over the customer. Not the quarterly earnings. Not the hot takes from analysts like Dan Ives. Not whatever "transformational synergy" consultants cooked up last week. Just. The. Customer. That’s how Amazon wins… and if they keep doing that, failure might still happen… but not until we’re ordering brain chips via telepathy and complaining that the neural download took more than 30 seconds.

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Fast forward to today. Bezos may be off launching rockets and growing his biceps, but the mindset he drilled into Amazon is alive and well… and the company’s latest moves prove it.

For starters, Amazon’s dropping $4 billion to expand delivery to over 4,000 small towns and rural communities across the U.S. by 2026. Sounds like a throwaway headline… until you realize this is Amazon kicking down the front doors of places where “next-day delivery” used to mean getting in your truck and picking it up yourself. Their fastest delivery speeds were once reserved for urban areas with three Targets per square mile. Now they’re showing up in Fort Seneca, Ohio and Sharptown, Maryland… towns where the only thing arriving fast is local gossip (and maybe the church bulletin).

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This is Amazon quietly redrawing the map of retail and making Prime essential in places with limited options. When your choices are 1. wait three days for toothpaste or 2. drive 45 minutes to a store that closes at 6… same-day delivery becomes a game-changer. Not only does Amazon pick up new customers… they build long-term loyalty where competitors barely exist. (Walmart's not thrilled, let’s just say that.)

And they’re playing the same game across the pond. Amazon announced a $54 billion investment in the U.K. over the next three years. That includes four new fulfillment centers, logistics upgrades, and a deeper push into AI. In my view, this move is about solidifying control over one of Amazon’s most important global markets. By building out faster and more efficient fulfillment capabilities, Amazon is raising consumer expectations around delivery speed… something local competitors in the U.K. are still struggling to keep up with. (Some are still working on getting basic shipments out the door in under a week.)

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Wall Street's seeing this too. Oppenheimer just raised its price target on Amazon from $215 to $250… and it’s not because they like the new packaging (although that’s part of it). Amazon’s gross margins are hovering just under 50%, and e-commerce margins are projected to hit 10.5% by 2026. That’s a big deal for a segment that used to survive on fumes. In other words: Amazon is learning how to make more money per order while still investing billions into faster delivery. (Basically: profit without pulling back… rare in retail.)

Then there’s AWS… Amazon’s cloud division and unofficial ATM. Still humming, still high-margin, and now a major piece of the company’s AI ambitions. CEO Andy Jassy says they’re leaning hard into generative AI, not just to increase performance, but to reduce future hiring. (Or as HR might put it: “We’re excited to let machines do your job faster and with fewer bathroom breaks.”) While that sucks for human employees, it’s good for shareholders.

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Even Prime Day is getting a strategic upgrade. This year, it’s a four-day marathon (July 8 to 11, mark your calendar) giving shoppers more time to grab deals and giving Amazon more time to turn impulse buys into recurring revenue. With more same-day delivery options for groceries and household staples, they’re making Prime even harder to cancel.

So yes, Bezos was right. Amazon will fail someday. But judging by the receipts (from small-town expansion and global infrastructure plays to better margins and deeper AI integration) that day’s not anywhere close.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon as mentioned in the article.

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