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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (27352)	11/20/1998 11:53:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

No, how can I blame someone for doing the same thing I would do if I were fortunate, hard-working and venturesome enough to be in his shoes? I give him high credit for playing the stock game almost to perfection. This is the new American dream - take a company public and reap quick rewards regardless of long-term success or failure of the enterprise. Business and personal fortunes are made by taking several possible outcomes into count - they are assuring their personal success by manipulating the current fever for the sector and perhaps cashing in some of their credibility and good name in order to take money off the table. And who can tell for sure that sales growth won't continue on a roll for another couple of quarters. One successful silicon valley type entrepreneur I met several years ago had made a fortune by starting up a medical electronics firm. He sold the company (he had about 36% of the stock) to an East coast medical conglomerate right after the company had come out with highly regarded new lines of products. I asked him why he had sold when it looked like sales and profits were increasing rapidly and market share were holding up nicely. His response was that they had found out that HP, a Japanese company I can't remember, and one other company were working on products to enter the now vibrant field. He decided that it was better to quit and move onto other things while the bloom was so apparently still on the rose. About 18 months after he had sold the company, taken a sabbatical and was already working on a new start-up, the competition entered the picture and the company started on several years of downturn which included huge losses for the parent company. The parent company eventually sold the acquisition off to a management led team. This is a common "alternative course of action" to realizing personal and corporate gains. Amazon.com has gotten to such a high price, now over $8 billion, that it is uneccessary to prep it for an acquisition and unlikely any company, even Microsoft, would want to buy it. So selling off a small amount of stock (relative to their total holdings) for hundreds of millions at this time makes a heck of a lot of sense. Bezos and family are no fools - pick the plum before winter sets in.