At $1 Trillion, Amazon Is Still Not Its Stock Price

Sept. 28, 2001, marked this century’s nadir for the stock price of Amazon.com Inc. Air was gushing out of the dot.com bubble, the world was reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and investors had lost confidence in the promises of a balding entrepreneur with an unsettling, riotous laugh.

In Seattle, 37-year-old Jeff Bezos scrawled “we are not our stock price!” on the white board in his office in a shambly old VA hospital atop a hill south of downtown. At the time, it seemed, everyone was panicking except the boss. He reminded his ragtag band of employees, many of them rushing for the exits, that “in the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine,” borrowing a phrase often attributed to renowned investor Benjamin Graham.