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What would happen if Amazon collapsed tomorrow?
3 points by agentgumshoe on June 20, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Out of curiosity I searched google for anything hypothesizing the impact of Amazon collapsing, but didn't find anything except books about socio-economic collapse...

What would happen?



Someone would buy AWS and it wouldn't have a second of downtime.

No one would buy retail and there would be beautiful competition in eretail.


Define "collapse." Suddenly their entire company and assets magically disappear? A good portion of the internet would vanish and we'd see a fascinating set of failures that would be the stuff of legend.


Agreed. Also, companies don't just fail for any random reason, and unless the underlying assets have been destroyed in some way, they still will retain their value. I'm struggling to even think of a reason why Amazon would fail, but let me try to think up a scenario.

Jeff Bezos and his top advisors get extremely complacent and happy in life and begin spending all their time playing golf or flying rockets or etc. Basically, they stop running Amazon as a company somehow (which would be a violation of a lot of laws since they're a publicly traded company).

The thousands of engineers and staff continue to sit at their desks and do nothing for a few months and just watch Netflix all day.

Simultaneously, Walmart, Sears, RedHat, and like 7000 other companies that compete with Amazon join forces to begin wooing over Amazon customers from all walks of life.

Eventually the checks start bouncing, developer salaries go unpaid at Amazon, the stock tanks, and the company goes bankrupt. Whoever was long Amazon probably faces financial ruin.

The real estate and physical assets are auctioned off to the highest bidder, and consumers may or may not benefit from Amazons lack of presence in the marketplace anymore




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