Amazon and Bezos were able to survive the bust. “As I watched the stock fall from 113 to 6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics: number of customers, profit per unit,” he says. “Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast. It’s a fixed-cost business. And so, what I could see is that, from the internal metrics, is that at a certain volume level that we would cover our fixed costs and the company would be profitable.”
