by David Kranzler
Investment Research Dynamics
Jeff Bezos was a master at GAAP accounting manipulation back when Elon Musk thought that “GAAP” was a clothing store chain. AMZN’s numbers are just as manipulated as Tesla’s. But the difference between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is that, whereas Musk is a pure caveman with his fraud, Bezos is clever about disguising and hiding the accounting manipulation. About six years ago I spent a considerable amount of time deep-diving into AMZN’s financials going back to 2004, which is when AMZN’s business really began to takeoff. After about two weeks of tedious but intensive study of the footnotes in 10Q’s and K’s, I pieced together a lot of the GAAP manipulation tools embedded in AMZN’s financials.