Massive company, so an activist would need a lot of capital for any noticeable stake. Overall reasonable and relatively consistently increasing valuation, so there is little incentive. If the stock does very poorly while AWS keeps growing, so the company value diverges further from the value of individual divisions added together (sum of the parts value), you could expect pressure on this.
Investors like profit and they like growth. The moment a business unit isn’t growing or profitable, you need to start justifying why you’re keeping it around.
On the topic of write offs, losing money isn’t great unless it’s used to fuel obscene growth. You don’t spend $2 to save $1. The “we lose money on every sale, but make up for it on volume” model doesn’t work in the long run. More simply, a business is worth the value of all future cash flow, and it’s that simple.
> Why would they do that when one entity's losses can be used as a tax write-off for the other entity's profits.
Because it's better to not have losses than to use them as tax write-offs (also, because basically every use of funds other than retaining profits is already a tax write-off for business, and the ones that aren't losses contribute to future profits.)
Losing and investing money are different things. It's all fine for future to spend money on new warehouses, distribution hubs and better software. But there is expectation that this will at least increase revenue if not the profits. If it does not it is just waste that any company is better off with.
