“THE CLOUDS surrounding Amazon.com are thickening,” began the Washington Post article by David Streitfeld on February 21, 2001. In the previous year, stockholders had suddenly learned that the internet was not immune to the boom-and-bust cycles of more earthbound forms of economic endeavor, and it seemed the Seattle-based bookseller was going to go the way of Pets.com, the most infamous example of late 1990s cyberhubris. Streitfeld noted that one detractor of Amazon “expects the Internet retailer to run out of money to adequately fund its operations later this year.”