Expensive or Not, Amazon Shares Are a Long-Term Bet on Bezos

At the start of 2001, investors in Amazon (AMZN) -- a Web retailer known mostly for hawking books at the time – were rocked when Lehman Brothers raised the prospect of bankruptcy for the upstart because of liquidity concerns. Nearly a decade later, Lehman has vanished. But Amazon has transformed the face of online retailing and is angling to do the same to industries spanning from electronic books to the delivery of computing power.