A million dollars: stories you may have missed

Back in the day, there was a fairly popular children’s author named Steven Kellog. If you had kiddos in the ‘90s, you might know some of his titles like A Rose for Pinkerton or The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash.

Another one was How Much Is a Million?

That one followed children as they earned a penny, and then a nickel, a quarter, a dollar, and then…

Well, you get the point. It goes all the way up to a million, which was considered an immense amount of money at the time.

Fast-forward to today, and we have companies that are throwing around financial numbers that were once unthinkable. For instance, JPMorgan (JPM) believes that Amazon (AMZN) will likely spend $476 billion – almost half a trillion dollars – in 2028 in its pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) dominance.

While that’s a somewhat speculative opinion, the e-tail giant will likely spend $220 billion this year on capital expenditures (capex) alone. And CEO Andy Jassy announced last week that Amazon plans to increase that amount “meaningfully” in 2027.

The fact that its free cash flow is deteriorating doesn’t seem to bother it. For last year’s third quarter, it had a trailing 12-month inflow of $14.8 billion. This year, it reported an outflow of $42.4 billion.

Moreover, investors seem to be shrugging off the shock of such astronomical numbers being thrown around so casually. I guess it’s becoming commonplace. While shares fell 1% on the news last Friday, they popped right back up again the very next trading day and continued to climb from there.

So how much is a million these days?

Not much at all, as it turns out.

We’re still in the thick of earnings season, as you well know. And real estate investment trusts (REITs) are still reporting how they did.

So far, we know the results for the three largest self-storage REITs – CubeSmart (CUBE), Extra Space (EXR), and Public Storage (PSA) – none of which are doing too bad. They all showed higher occupancy for the third quarter and more stable rental activity.

CRE Daily, one of my favorite commercial real estate sources, wrote this week that:

In addition:

Even so, Extra Space did better, with same-store revenue rising 2.7%, expenses falling 1.8%, and core FFO that rose 4.3% to $2.17 per share. Meanwhile, occupancy sat at 94% by quarter’s end.

Public Storage, for its part, reported a barely-there same-store revenue growth from $1.01 billion in Q3-25 to $1.02 billion. Yet that was still a welcome improvement since this metric was falling earlier this year.

Likewise, core FFO rose from $4.31 to $4.34. And occupancy ticked up slightly as well from 91.9% to 92.2%.

The REIT was encouraged enough by those results that it raised its full-year core FFO per share guidance from $16.75–$17.05 to $16.90–$17.10.

Maybe there’s a whole article to be written about these results?

I’ll have to look further into it the details to see…

I’ve made my position on data centers very clear this year despite the popular (and sometimes very strongly worded) opinions on the other side of the aisle. But I’m clearly losing my case considering this past week’s elections.

While most people are marveling about the blue tsunami that happened, Texas turning blue, the first openly Muslim U.S. senator, and so on, we can’t forget that data centers were on the ballot as well.

And they lost. Intensely. Breitbart News called it an “AI earthquake” as voters delivered a “sweeping rebuke to [the] data center buildout.”

Apparently, it wasn’t just attacking the high cost of living that Texas Governor-to-be Gina Hinojosa ran on. It was also reining in data centers until further studies can be done about their effect on the environment and economy.

It was a shared talking point in Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona as well. And nationwide, 41 separate measures addressed data center concerns.

Considering the results, I’d say it’s safe to say that voters outright despise these big tech constructs and want nothing to do with them – at least in their own backyards.

But now that the elections are over, it will be interesting to see next year exactly how those stump speeches and political promises are actually enacted. Or if they’re enacted at all.

That’s always the question, isn’t it?

Big Tech companies such as Alphabet (GOOG), Meta (META), and Amazon are enormous donors to Democrats as well as Republicans. International corporations in general tend to hedge their bets, wanting to retain backdoor diplomacy power regardless of which party is in charge.

And we all know how politicians tend to favor their donors over their constituents.

Let’s hope that, however this plays out, it’s for the actual and long-lasting good of the nation.

Happy SWAN investing,

Brad Thomas
Editor, The Wide Moat Daily