I stumbled across this little gem from an article in the Guardian called 'Amazon.bomb', from June 2000.
I love that at the time no-one would think to question Lehman Brothers' word vs that of a young internet up-start.
By contrast, today Amazon has annual revenues of over $60bn (higher than Google), and is the 6th most visited site in the world.
Lehman Brothers on the other hand... are not doing quite so well.
Last Friday was ... probably the worst day in the history of [Amazon,] the internet retailer that had become the shining success story of electronic commerce. The day had cost Bezos personally around a billion dollars. It began with a report from Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, warning that the company was haemorrhaging cash and might not survive. Analyst Ravi Suria highlighted Amazon's "weak balance sheet, poor working capital management, and massive negative operating cashflow - the financial characteristics that have driven innumerable retailers to disaster through history." It was a day during which Amazon's shares lost 20% of their value, and 51m of them changed hands. A company worth about $40bn (£25bn) just before Christmas had ended the day worth $12bn (£7.5bn), and things did not improve during trading yesterday.
A link to the full article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2000/jun/27/efinance.books
(The real Amazon. Which is faring less well, as I understand it.)