A company I used to work for used to bad-mouth their financial situation every four years or so. Funny, but it was always right before contract negotiation time.
I wonder if Bezos is trying the same sort of thing. “Don’t ask for more money, guys. We’re on the road to bankruptcy as it is.”
Maybe but what he says is true. The free enterprise system is such that companies have their ups and downs, and leaders are eventually replaced by upstarts that do things better, cheaper, etc. There are some big companies that trace their founding to the 19th century (e.g., DuPont, the Standard Oil spinoffs like Exxon & Chevron, G.E., AT&T/Verizon as descendants of the original AT&T, etc.), but for every one of those, there are 100s of firms that have collapsed. Think of all the dominant retailers of just 40-50 years ago that are dead or dying (Sears, Montgomery Ward, JC Penney, Woolworth)... replaced by WalMart, Target, Amazon.
I have heard talk of a push to unionize Amazon workers ...