As an accounting student, the idea that Amazon is using capital leases as way of manipulating their financials is hilarious. That's the exact opposite of what everyone else does. Most companies try to hide debt they incur to buy infrastructure by claiming that they're actually renting it. This is why there are complicated rules about what kind leasing agreements count as debt and which count as expenses.

The claim repeatedly and misleadingly made in the article that Amazon doesn't post a profit is easily debunked by the fact that they're a publicly traded company that legally has to have it profits made publicly available. They make a profit. They have for a long time. It goes up and it goes down as they expand and reinvest, but they're definitely not intentionally taking a loss.

And they have to have their accounting methods and control systems used to be audited by an independent third party annually to ensure compliance with generally accepted accounting principles. As far as I'm aware, they've never had an adverse opinion issued against them. The whole point of making public companies undergo an audit every single year is to make sure they're doing any shenanigans that make their annual statements in some way not comparable to the financial statements of other companies in that industry.

It's incredibly annoying to see an article like this get shared because it's incredibly obvious the author doesn't know what the heck he's talking about, but just enough to fool readers into thinking he does.