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The company's cloud business posted a profit of $391 million. Revenue grew 81 percent compared to last year and AWS is now a $6 billion-a-year business. For something that basically didn't exist a decade ago, that's astounding.

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Over the weekend, Amazon quietly rolled out a series of changes to its “Amazon Household” program and the ability for Prime members to share their shipping benefits. The changes are designed to limit the ability for customers to share Amazon Prime subscriptions with those who are not actually members of their immediate family, it appears.

Amazon previously allowed anyone with an Amazon Prime subscription to share shipping benefits and a few others, including Prime Instant Video access, with up to four other “household” members. But with a change to its policies at the end of July, Amazon now only allows a Prime member to share their Prime benefits with one other adult.

What’s more, anyone sharing an account has access to each other’s credit cards to make purchases. That’s obviously not a problem for spouses or significant others who live together and share their financials, but it does put a damper on sharing your Prime benefits with extended family members, or with your friends or roommates, for example.

And that’s likely the intention.

Following the update to the rules, two adults can now share their Prime benefits, which include the free, two-day shipping, Prime Instant Video streaming, access to Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, Prime Early Access and Prime Exclusive deals.

In addition to the two adults, each household can also have up to four “child” profiles, which makes it easier for family members to share Kindle books across devices. Meanwhile, explains Amazon, Amazon Student Prime members and other invited guests of Prime members can’t share their benefits. But Prime members with Amazon Mom can share their 20 percent diaper and 15 percent Baby Registry discounts.

The two adults will also need to authorize each other to use the credit and debit cards associated with their Amazon accounts, which can then be used to make purchases on Amazon in the future. They’re both able to configure the family’s shared library of books, apps, and games, too, and can manage parental controls on Amazon FreeTime for the children associated with the account.

The concept of “Amazon Household” itself is not new, we should point out. The company in September of last year introduced “Family Library” as a way for household members to share their content purchases. And households could share their shipping benefits before, too.

But now that “Amazon Household” program is basically absorbing the other Prime shipping benefit sharing option, which before allowed any Prime member to share access to Amazon’s free, two-day shipping with others, provided you knew their email and birthday. (Clearly those requirements were intended to limit sharing to just family, but asking a friend for their birthday was easy enough, many realized.)

Or more simply put, Amazon Household has replaced Prime Sharing for anyone who had yet to set up this option.

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Jeff Bezos just sold $534 million worth of Amazon stock

Aug 5, 2015, 6:26pm PDT

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos just sold off more than 1 million shares of the company he founded. The stock sale, which was reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, netted Bezos $534 million. He still holds nearly 83 million shares worth about $44.5 billion.

CEOs frequently sell stock and buy stock on a regular schedule, but this sale, first reported by the Seattle Times, is far more than Bezos typically sells.

Last year, he sold $351 million worth of Amazon stock and the previous year, just after he bought the Washington Post, he sold $250 million worth of stock.

There's really only one reason to do that when you're already a billionaire: He wants the money for something in particular.

There are plenty of things for Bezos to spend his money on.

Bezos has an investing group, Bezos Expeditions, which has invested in a variety of startups and businesses. The group is also an investor in the giant 10,000-year clock in the Texas desert. Bezos is one of the largest landowners in Texas and a giant Texas ranch is currently for sale.

It's unlikely Bezos is getting into the cattle industry, though. His Texas land is used for testing and launching rockets.

In addition to Amazon, Bezos also founded Blue Origin, a space and rocket company based in Kent. That company has had some success lately and is gearing up to compete with the big guys when it comes to outfitting U.S. military systems.

If Blue Origin is serious about its space tourism ambitions – and it seems clear the company is– then it will take a lot of cash to get those rockets off the ground. Bezos has a lot of competition when it comes to billionaires going to space, and he's pretty ruthless when it comes to competition in the past.

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Bezos Overtakes Slim as World's Fourth-Richest on Amazon Rally

- Amazon founder's net worth has more than doubled in 2015

Jeff Bezos has edged past Carlos Slim to become the world’s fourth-richest person, buoyed by a 113 percent rally this year in Amazon.com Inc.

The 51-year-old founder of the world’s largest online retailer passed the Mexican telecommunications tycoon Tuesday after Amazon rose $4.19 by the close of trading in New York. Bezos commands a fortune of $58.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Slim, who was the world’s richest person as recently as May 2013, is now ranked fifth with $57.2 billion. He’s lost $15.4 billion in 2015, more than any other billionaire on the index.

Bezos has increased his fortune 103.5 percent in 2015 as investors have cheered profits at Amazon and growth in its cloud storage business. His $29.6 billion year-to-date gain is the biggest of any billionaire on the Bloomberg index, a daily ranking of the world’s 400 richest people.

Biggest Gains

The second-largest gain belongs to Spain’s Amancio Ortega, the founder of Inditex SA, the world’s largest clothing retailer, who’s risen $12.7 billion, a 21 percent gain.

U.S. investor Warren Buffett is the world’s third-richest person with a net worth of $63.2 billion. Ortega ranks second with $73.7 billion. Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates remains the world’s richest, with a net worth of $85 billion, according to the index.

Bezos’s climb also reflects the strength of U.S. mega-cap technology stocks, which have boosted the fortunes of other leading technology billionaires. Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s eighth-richest person with $47.1 billion and has increased his wealth by $12.6 billion this year. Alphabet co-founder Larry Page is the 10th-richest on the planet with $39 billion, and has added $9.3 billion in 2015. Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison is ninth with a $42.6 billion fortune. He’s slipped $6.2 billion this year.

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Microsoft Gets Lift From Cloud Gains

Software giant’s Azure service offsets decline in Windows segment and struggling mobile-phone business

July 19, 2016

Microsoft Corp. remains a distant second to Amazon.com Inc. in cloud computing, but the software giant’s latest quarterly results suggest it is effectively managing the transition from selling software licenses to selling on-demand computing services.

In its fiscal fourth quarter, sales of the Redmond, Wash., company’s Azure cloud computing service more than doubled, offsetting a decline in the segment that includes its flagship Windows operating system and its struggling mobile-phone business.

The strength of Microsoft’s cloud business surprised investors. The company beat expectations for both sales and profit, which spurred a 4% rise in Microsoft’s shares in after-hours trading.

Microsoft has proved especially adept at selling its cloud services to existing customers, taking advantage of longstanding relationships with companies that have run its software in their own data centers.

Microsoft’s transition to the cloud comes with an important cost: eroded margins. When the company relied on software licenses sold to companies every few years, it registered fat profits. But margins on cloud services, which are sold by subscription, are slimmer.

For the quarter, gross margins slid 14% to $12.64 billion.

Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood expected margins to decline slightly in the next year as well, she said in an interview.

Chief Executive Satya Nadella in his two years on the job has orchestrated the shift. In the process, he has pulled Microsoft back from its mobile-phone investments championed by his predecessor Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft’s decision to roll back the phone business—along with a continuing decline in sales of personal computers that run its Windows operating system—led the company to post its first decline in annual revenue since 2009. Sales fell 8.8% to $85.32 billion in fiscal 2016.

For the year, revenue from the reporting segment that includes Windows and mobile phones fell 6.3% to $40.46 billion. For the fourth quarter, sales in that segment fell to $8.9 billion, a decline of 3.7% year over year (2% in constant currency), even as revenue from sales of Windows to computer makers rose 11%.

The biggest gains came in the segment that includes the Azure cloud computing services. There, revenue amounted to $6.71 billion, a rise of 6.6%, or 9.6% in constant currency. Notably, revenue for Azure alone grew 102% (108% in constant currency) year over year.

The other big gain came in the segment that includes Microsoft’s Office productivity tools as well as its Dynamics business programs. That segment posted sales of $6.97 billion, a year-over-year gain of 4.6%, or 7.6% in constant currency. Revenue from commercial sales of the cloud-based Office 365 jumped 54%.

Ms. Hood said that with some investments in cloud infrastructure in the rear-view mirror, she expected Microsoft to begin reaping economies of scale.

“We have invested heavily to build [market] share, expand geographically and ensure world-class support and reliability for our commercial customers,” she said. “Going forward, we expect those investments to provide benefits of scale. We also anticipate our cloud capital expenditure growth curve will slow.”

Microsoft posted $3.12 billion in fourth-quarter net income, or 39 cents a share, compared with a loss of $3.2 billion, or 40 cents a share, a year ago. The year-earlier results included $8.4 billion in charges related to the company’s mobile-phone operation.

Excluding the impact of revenue deferrals and restructuring charges, adjusted earnings rose to 69 cents from 62 cents a year earlier. Revenue slid 7.1% to $20.61 billion and was $22.64 billion on an adjusted basis.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected Microsoft to report adjusted earnings per share of 58 cents and sales of $22.1 billion.

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