It seems to me that Amazon or any large e-commerce company could duplicate every aspect of Wish&#x27;s business for a tiny fraction of the $10 billion they offered.<p>I have no personal knowledge, but I&#x27;m going to offer 3 theories on what&#x27;s really going on:<p>(a) Perhaps Wish is undergoing exponential growth and there&#x27;s no way Amazon can catch up if they did it themselves. This is why Microsoft paid a fortune to acquire Hotmail rather than just creating their own free email service. (The $400 million that Microsoft paid seemed absurdly crazy at the time. That&#x27;s <i>million</i>, not billion. How quaint the web was.)<p>(b) Not all decisions are driven by hard reasoning about money and numbers. Executives enjoy schmoozing, hobnobbing, and doing &quot;big deals&quot;. Would you rather be the worker-bee executive who spends the next 2 years and $30 million creating a division that duplicates Wish&#x27;s business model or be the bigwig who orchestrated a ten <i>billion</i> dollar deal in 3 months? It&#x27;s not your money after all.<p>(c) Accounting rules vastly favor investing in other companies rather than spending it internally. This is nicely explained in an old article by John Walker, founder of Autodesk:<p><i>&quot;Many people think that because Autodesk has $140 million squirreled away,
we can use that money free of constraints. But that isn&#x27;t how it works.
Regardless of how prudent you&#x27;ve been piling up money over the years, the
moment you spend any of it in your business, it&#x27;s just as if you increased
your day to day operating budget. That means rising expenses without an
increase in sales, and that translates into . . . falling margins.<p>About the only thing you can do with the money that doesn&#x27;t cause margins
to fall, other than giving it back in dividends, is investing it in other
companies. When you make an investment, that&#x27;s carried on the books as
capital. As long as you don&#x27;t have to write the investment off, it doesn&#x27;t
affect your operating results.&quot;</i><p>Or maybe some combination of (a), (b), and (c) above.