Cannot speak for the rest, but the whole “Amazon didn’t turn a profit for years” (as an argument about their profitability now coming solely through quasi-monololy routes) is incredibly misleading and bordering on disingenuous.

Since before AWS was even a thing, Amazon was already turning up great revenue and could’ve easily just stopped expanding and investing into the company growth, and they would be profitable easily. Instead, Amazon decided to reinvest all their potential profits into growth/expansion (with the favorable tax treatment on top) at the expense of keeping the cash profits. At any given point, Amazon could’ve stopped reinvesting all potential profits into their growth, and they would be instantly profitable.

This is not the same as Uber, which ran their core service operations at a net loss (and was only cheap due to their investors eating the difference and hoping that Uber will eventually figure out how to not lose money on operating their core service).

Ok, we can debate on Uber, but your take on Amazon is very similar to today's LLM providers. They too are making good revenue on their product, but put so much cash into growth that they at least appear to be running at a loss.