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Next decade investing
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Equities

Why Aziz backs Amazon, Oracle and Tesla

January 07, 2026 - 7 min

While the businesses that Aziz Hamzaogullari and Loomis Sayles’ Growth Equities Strategies Team invest in have great diversity, there is one characteristic many of them share. Around half of the businesses the team backs are led by their founders. In this video Aziz shares three long-held founder-driven businesses he backs: Amazon, Oracle and Tesla.

Find out more about why Aziz and his team back founder-driven businesses.

This video was recorded in October 2025.

 

Lightly edited transcript

How has Amazon changed since you first invested?

We invested in that company almost two decades ago, when we invested, it was just an e-commerce company, but their core business was already providing, for us investors, significant cash flow growth opportunities at a significant discount to intrinsic value. It started as an e-commerce business, but over the years they also started Amazon Web Services, which was very much linked to their e-commerce business. They were investing heavily in technology and realised that they had a big cost centre, so why not turn that cost centre into a profit centre by selling what they do internally to other companies?

Amazon Web Services was the clear leader in cloud services; they were the first entrant, well ahead of Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others. Jeff Bezos really saw an opportunity in a market that was very nascent, and this not only created another growth driver for their business but also made their core e-commerce business much stronger. Later, they added logistics as part of their business. Amazon used to rely on UPS and FedEx for delivery of their packages, and now almost all their packages are delivered by Amazon. That was also a very long-term decision that Jeff Bezos made, understanding that their growth would be constrained if they were just to rely on FedEx and UPS because they were not able to invest at the pace required.

So today, they have a third business, which is logistics, and they created another business in advertising. Today, Amazon generates over $60 billion in advertising, which is bigger than most advertising companies. We started with one business, which provided us with significant growth and upside from our point of investing, roughly two decades ago. Over time, this company, because of its understanding of its own ecosystem and having a founder that looked long-term and invested in businesses with sustainable competitive advantages, only getting into businesses where the company offered something truly differentiated and different from others, while also having a significant total addressable market (TAM) to grow. That led to Amazon.

 

When did you first invest in Tesla and why are you still holding it, despite the controversy around Elon Musk?

Tesla has been a holding since 2022. In 2022, Tesla was one of the worst-performing companies in the market, and we took advantage of that weakness in the shares and added to our holdings. Our investment thesis, like our other holdings, centres around quality, growth, and valuation. First, let's start with the quality of the business. We believe Tesla has very significant competitive advantages in terms of its brand, focus, business model, scale, and a very entrepreneurial culture.

Let me elaborate on these points. We believe Tesla has built an industry-leading brand almost entirely through word of mouth and does not spend much money on formal advertising. The company has become the most dominant global EV player, with around 25% of the electric vehicle market share and strong brand awareness.

We believe Tesla has very significant and strong competitive advantages that would be very difficult to replicate by someone else if they had the time and capital. This company has strong advantages, including its brand, focus, business model, scale, and a very entrepreneurial culture.

Let me elaborate on each of these points. First and foremost, building an electric vehicle is significantly and structurally different from traditional vehicles, in that it's much more software-centric. It's not just about putting together parts like you do in traditional cars; it's more about, as Tesla understood, with a very visionary decision with end-to-end vertical integration and creating its own supply chain for that form of manufacturing electric vehicles.

The supply chain for electric vehicles is also very different from the traditional auto supply chain. So, this company created this category from the ground up and now has a very strong brand with clear leadership in electric vehicles, with a very high market share in North America, as well as in China, and a strong presence in Europe. We believe that building this brand and creating an end-to-end vertically integrated manufacturing capability for electric vehicles is very difficult to replicate.

The evidence for that is when you look at all the traditional players—they're coming into the market, but they're really struggling to put together a competitive business model. The evidence for that is the very low market shares of the traditional players, like GM, Ford, Toyota, and others. We believe this is due to the uniqueness of the manufacturing model.In addition, Tesla has disrupted the business model in several ways. Firstly, they have full vertical integration, which is very different from most auto manufacturers. Secondly, the way they distribute their products is direct to consumer, eliminating the dealership model. Thirdly, they are disrupting the service model because most traditional auto manufacturers and dealers make their money from servicing these cars, while electric vehicles require much less service and maintenance. It is estimated that roughly 80% of Tesla car problems can be solved without taking them into the shop, which really disrupts the traditional business model.

I think another important feature is the change in the business model in that rather than getting your sales and profits from selling a car at the point of sale Tesla is getting recurring revenue from subscription services, like FSD which is autonomous driving, and we believe that today Tesla has around 12% of its installed base on subscription services. We believe that over time, the vast majority of the cars it sells will have this recurring revenue, this profit stream. By the way, the margins on the subscription services, which are software-centric, is very high compared to what you get from a car sale.

In addition to this, you have a visionary founder, Elon Musk, which we know is a very controversial topic. What Elon Musk provides for this company is, first of all, a very clear vision of where this business is going—creating an end-to-end, 100% vertically integrated manufacturing capability, but extending the company into battery manufacturing, improvements in the electric grid with their storage business, and getting into robot taxis, with the company aiming to produce 1 million units. They also aim to produce over 1 million plus humanoid robots and increase their installed base to 20 million cars.

All of these come from Elon Musk's clear vision for where the company wants to go. In addition, he is a major shareholder, which I think makes us very much aligned in terms of value creation. His personal wealth is tied to this, but he also uses Tesla stock for paying Tesla employees, which makes it an important currency for the company.


You also own Oracle, are there any similarities between Oracle and the other founder-driven businesses you own?

We have owned Oracle for roughly two decades. It started as a database business, which is a fantastic business because when you buy a database, it's a very long-term decision. A company usually makes that decision with a view for the next 10 years. You don't just buy your database and then switch to something better the next day. Switching costs are extremely high, making it very difficult for a company to rip off Oracle and just bring in another vendor.

So we like the database business, the core business for Oracle, because it provides very high recurring profits and has a very sticky client base, which leads to those high recurring profits. The barriers are very high, evidenced by the fact that Oracle has been the leader in databases for almost three to four decades now. On top of that, they created an applications business, selling applications as a solution as part of the stack. They then offered cloud services, and now they are extending those cloud services to AI infrastructure.

This is a company that has evolved over time. Similarly, Meta and Google started with their core businesses, and now they have many products. Google has more than ten products that have over half a billion users. This is one commonality we have in our founder-driven businesses, where these companies continue to evolve and extend their core competitive advantages while also driving further growth by expanding into adjacent markets related to their core businesses.

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