Who Did Jeff Bezos Quote About the Stock Market?

Ethan Evans says the person Jeff Bezos quoted a lot was Benjamin Graham, the investor Warren Buffett also follows. Graham's line is that the market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Bezos used his own version. When Amazon's stock rises 10 percent, the company did not just get 10 percent smarter. When it falls 10 percent, people should not walk around feeling 10 percent dumber. The vote swings. The work is to increase the weight, and the price gets pulled back toward that weight.

He told the company to live with the volatility. His letters said Amazon would take cash flow over short-term results and would prioritize free cash flow instead of optimizing for quarters. Evans was around for the era when Amazon turned a profit for a single quarter and then went negative again. Bezos called that one profitable quarter a terrible mistake. It became the comparison point. If they had stayed slightly in the red, they could have remained the company that was still losing money until they chose to be profitable.