I assume at this point that most people know or knew that Amazon was heavily invested in electric vehicle maker $RIVN -- if not, you are now! In studying $PLTR's investments (in a post that will come out later this month, when their latest 13-F is released), I realized that Dr. Karp - who co-founded a money management firm in London called the Caedmon Group - was probably not the only CEO allocating capital in other publicly traded companies.

Remembering the $RIVN investment, I was curious if Amazon had any others. It turns out, they do! Their list includes companies like Rivian, but also $ATSG (aircraft leasing co), $IONQ (quantum computing co), $MRVL (semiconductors), $NAUT (biosciences co), $OWLT ("smart" baby products), $SMRT (real estate tech co), $TWLO (enterprise communications), and $VITL, which @nathanworden posted about earlier today as he locked in his gains!

Some of these stick out as potential acquisitions (SMRT could be the commercial equivalent of purchasing Ring, OWLT could provide a lot of data about babies, perhaps TWLO could be complementary to AWS, etc), but Peter Lynch once said that the person who turns over the most rocks wins the game, and given that I own both $PLTR and $AMZN, it seemed like a good rock to turn over to see what public companies THEY thought were worth investing in.

Of course, we don't know why they chose to invest, and Palantir's strategy in particular seems more like a VC play, where they're hoping for one big winner to offset all of the losers, given that multiple investments in 2021 and 2022 have already been delisted and are down 90% or more -- losses which played a part in their own GAAP losses in 2022, which explains why they sold quite a bit of their holdings and began focusing on profitability this year (a move that combined with the AI hype cycle has paid off in spades for shareholders).

In any event, a couple companies in their portfolio that have made their way into my portfolio for speculative bets, and once their new 13-F is released in the next couple weeks, we'll do a deeper dive into Palantir's investments - they also have a quantum computing firm in their roster, so I'll be curious to compare that stock and $IONQ and see which CEO had more success allocating resources to quantum computing.

For anyone who wants a fun list of rocks to turn over, here is $GOOGL's latest reporting.. 58 companies worth!