I’ve Been Wrong About Amazon Stock for Almost 10 Years. Here’s Why I’m Finally Changing My Mind. | The Motley Fool

For most of the last decade, I looked at Amazon (AMZN +0.81%) and thought, “Amazing business, but too messy for me as a shareholder.”

I saw razor-thin retail margins, huge capital spending, and a company that seemed to reinvent itself every other year.

Now I find myself changing my mind, not because the stock has gone up, but because the underlying business looks very different than the one I kept passing on.

The profit engine I underestimated

For years, I treated Amazon as just a retailer. That was my first mistake. Today, its own filings make it clear that the profit center is Amazon Web Services (AWS), not cardboard boxes. In 2025, AWS generated roughly mid-double-digit billions in operating income, far more than the retail segments, and did so with margins that look more like a software company than a store.

What changed my thinking was seeing that AWS is not a side hustle layered on top of e-commerce. It is the backbone of a huge part of the…