In the long arc of corporate history, few stories illuminate the gap between perception and reality quite like Amazon's last decade — a period in which the business grew so profoundly that its stock price, despite quintupling, actually failed to keep pace with its own profits. Peter Thiel's hedge fund, by disclosing Amazon as its largest holding, has drawn fresh attention to a company that transformed from a barely profitable retailer into a $77.7 billion net-income machine, largely on the strength of cloud computing and a quietly dominant advertising empire. The deeper lesson is not about one