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The Founder's Notes

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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Luxury · NYSE: RACE

Ferrari

A Maranello carmaker that ships fewer than 14,000 cars a year, keeps every one of them on a waiting list by policy, and is valued by the stock market as a luxury house rather than an automaker.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

Enzo Ferrari built road cars to pay for the racing. The company he left behind learnt that the racing pays for the road cars, and that the waiting list pays for everything.
The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Watch it
Own it

Moat

Wide

Brand · Scale economics · Process power

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power
Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power

Headline figures

Revenue
≈ €6.68B
EBITDA margin
38.3%
Cars shipped
13,752
Seasons in Formula 1
Every one since 1950
Net sales
$638B
AWS share of operating income
~58%
Retail operating margin
~5.4%
Third-party share of units
~60%

Unit economics

One car shipped, FY2024 averages

Ferrari clears about €137,000 of operating profit on every car, which is roughly what a well-equipped Porsche 911 costs. A volume carmaker earns a few thousand euros a car and a bad year wipes it out. The gap is not engineering; it is the waiting list, which lets Ferrari sell every car it makes at the price it names.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

If the Elettrica's order book at launch runs as long as the combustion cars' — eighteen months or more — then the brand transfers to the drivetrain and the transition risk I am pricing is not real. If instead Ferrari has to open allocation on any electric or hybrid model to clients with no purchase history, the waiting list is being managed rather than earned, and the whole valuation rests on a number that has started to move.
If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

No mechanisms in common

These two share no tagged mechanism, which usually means the comparison is about contrast rather than pattern — a useful thing to know before you start writing.