Should You Buy Amazon Stock, Even Though It Has Badly Underperformed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 Since Jeff Bezos Stepped Down as CEO?

AMZN’s discount is less about growth scarcity and more about credibility: investors have spent years assigning a lower multiple to a company that keeps spending like a hyperscaler while still carrying retail-style margin drag. If AWS is genuinely reaccelerating, the rerating path is through operating leverage, not top-line excitement; the stock can outperform even without changing the retailer narrative, as long as cloud growth holds and capex intensity starts to translate into higher FCF per dollar of spend.

The second-order winners are less obvious. MSFT and GOOG have benefited from the market assuming AWS share losses are durable; that assumption gets challenged if Amazon’s proprietary chips and capacity build-out lower unit costs enough to widen the customer funnel. NVDA is the near-term beneficiary of the broader AI capex cycle, but over 6-18 months Trainium matters as a structural threat if Amazon proves it can internalize more inference spend and reduce dependence on external accelerators.

The key risk is that the backlog narrative is being over-read as revenue certainty when it may simply reflect demand visibility during a period of very heavy build-out. If cloud growth slips back toward the low-20s or margin expansion stalls, the stock can stay range-bound for quarters even with strong headlines. The contrarian view is that the move may be only partly overdone: AMZN is no longer priced like a hypergrowth winner, but it still has to prove that AI capex is converting into durable economics rather than just preserving share.