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Amazon buys Pill distributor, sends pharmacy stocks tumbling

Accepted submission by bob_super at 2018-06-28 21:36:55 from the resistance-is-futile dept.
Business

By buying an online pharmacy allowed to deliver in all US states [arstechnica.com] for a billion dollars, Amazon entered a new market and caused incumbents' stocks to plummet. The stock valuations of the traditional players lost 12.8 billion dollars just from the announcement.
Will Amazon help Americans afford their medications? How does it combine with their announced combined healthcare provider with JPMorgan and Bershire Hataway [sorry, no link], and will it scale to the rest of us from there?

Side consideration: If I was Amazon/Bezos, I would have looked at the legality of using my own cash to short the not-yet competitors before announcing my move. Once you're so scary that you can move the needle by almost $13B just by spending one, the right short could actually make the operation free, or even profitable. Does anyone know why this wouldn't be legal ?


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