With AMZN commanding 5% of the S&P's entire market capitalization, the market is not some independent entity that AMZN can be compared to; the S&P follows what AMZN does.

I might be misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're claiming that the 95% of the S&P that is not Amazon "follows what AMZN does"? If so, I'd like to hear more about exactly how that works because it sounds very unintuitive, to say the least.

In any case, my point was that objectively, AMZN suffered less today than many other stocks, including many other large cap tech (QQQ) and non-tech (S&P) stocks. Considering those facts, it seems like a stretch to claim "the market clearly thought it was strange as well".

You have what I would describe as a Ben Graham '80s-era view of how the stock market works. The stock market is fundamentally a very different beast post-2008. The top ten companies in the S&P 500 make up 36% of the entire index's market capitalization. In 1980, this number was closer to 15%.

One cannot draw any conclusions about how an individual stock in the S&P 10 performs relative to the overall market, because of how correlated these companies are and how much their combined weight contributes to the overall market. Every company in the S&P 10 is a tech company, except Berkshire. They trade together, and how they trade impacts the entire S&P 500.

When Jassy says something, it impacts Google's stock. When it comes out that OpenAI might have to sue Microsoft, it impacts Amazon's stock. Why this happens only makes sense to wall street's HFT systems which, quite honestly, are likely closer at this point to ASI than OpenAI; albeit totally unintelligible in their motives and reasoning.

Amazon did not outperform the market. The market is Amazon. The S&P 10 is not 10 individual companies; its one company.