If you&#x27;re talking about &quot;threats,&quot; I don&#x27;t see what retained earnings have to do with anything.  Amazon&#x27;s revenue is roughly half of what Apple&#x27;s is -- Amazon is significantly smaller, but it&#x27;s in same ballpark as Apple, not orders of magnitude smaller.<p>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures).  Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks.  Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.