Amazon (company)

• 1. Introduction

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  Amazon began, on the 5th of July 1994, in the converted garage of a house in Bellevue, Washington, under a name most people have never heard: Cadabra. Jeff Bezos had just relocated from New York City to start an online bookstore, and he chose the Seattle area deliberately - for its concentration of technical talent near Microsoft and the University of Washington, for its smaller population and the tax advantages that came with it, and for a practical reason that sounds almost mundane: a major book distribution warehouse sat just down the road in Roseburg, Oregon. Within a few months, Cadabra became Amazon. Within three decades, it became one of the largest companies on earth. How does a garage bookstore turn into a cloud computing giant, a satellite internet provider, a grocery chain, a film studio, a pharmacy, and a household robot maker - all at once? And what does that expansion cost the workers, the small businesses, and the communities caught in its path?

• 2. From Books to Everything

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  On the 16th of July 1995, Amazon's website opened to the public, sourcing books directly from wholesalers and publishers. Bezos had already purchased the URL www.relentless.com when considering names for the company, and that domain still redirects to Amazon's homepage today. The pace of expansion was relentless in practice. By 1998, Amazon had moved into music and videos and acquired online booksellers in the United Kingdom and Germany. The following year, it added music, video games, consumer electronics, home improvement items, software, and toys. By 2000, the company had entered a 10-year agreement with Toys "R" Us, valued at $50 million per year plus a share of sales, giving the toy retailer exclusive rights to sell toys and baby products through Amazon. That deal eventually collapsed when Amazon allowed other sellers into those same categories anyway. A court sided with Toys "R" Us in 2006 and later awarded $51 million in damages. The willingness to break exclusivity agreements with partners - and the legal fights that followed - would become a recurring pattern in Amazon's relationships with merchants.

• 3. The Cloud Beneath Everything

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  Amazon Web Services launched in 2002 as something modest: a set of APIs to help web developers build applications on top of Amazon's own e-commerce platform. It took a few years before the full ambition of the project became clear. In 2006, AWS introduced Simple Storage Service, known as S3, followed in 2008 by Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, allowing companies to rent data storage and computing power directly from Amazon's infrastructure. That shift toward enterprise services changed the nature of the company. By the time figures became widely available, AWS held 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market, ahead of Microsoft Azure at 21% and Google Cloud at 10%, according to Synergy Group. AWS now accounts for roughly 15.8% of Amazon's total sales by business segment, despite being invisible to most consumers. The internal culture that produced AWS traces back to one of Bezos's most famous internal mandates: a memo requiring all teams to expose their data and functionality through service interfaces designed, as he put it, to be externalizable. That discipline of building services as if an outside customer might one day use them is what, in retrospect, created the product that AWS would become.

• 4. The Acquisition Machine

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  Amazon acquired Audible in March 2008 for about $300 million. Twitch came in August 2014 for $970 million. Ring cost $1 billion in 2018. Whole Foods Market, acquired in August 2017 for $13.7 billion, was the largest and most consequential of these purchases - it gave Amazon a physical retail footprint of more than 500 locations and immediately changed its standing as a grocery competitor. The acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in March 2022 brought a vast film and television library under Amazon's control. Goodreads, which had been founded in December 2006 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri and had grown to over 650,000 members by December 2007, joined the Amazon family in March 2013. Each acquisition extended Amazon's reach into a new sector. Some were absorbed quietly into Amazon's infrastructure. Others, like Zoox, its self-driving car division, remain semi-independent and are now expected to start charging passengers for rides in Las Vegas in early 2026. The pattern across all of them is the same: Amazon acquires a capability, integrates it, and uses it to close one more gap in the chain between a product and the customer who wants it.

• 5. Work Inside the Machine

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  Inside Amazon's fulfillment centers, a picker may walk 10 or more miles a day. Hand-held computers communicate with a central system that records where every item is stored and maps out the most efficient routes for retrieval. In newer facilities, robots built by Amazon Robotics bring entire storage pods to the workers, rather than the other way around. Amazon first opened its distribution network in 1997 with two fulfillment centers, in Seattle and New Castle, Delaware. The network now includes 75 fulfillment centers and 25 sortation centers employing over 125,000 people in those facilities alone. The company is the second-largest private employer in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon hired more than 100,000 staff in the United States and Canada. Yet workers in the US, France, Italy, and Spain raised formal complaints or legal challenges over warehouse conditions during the same period. In December 2024, Amazon workers led by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters went on strike in at least four US states. And in October 2025, Amazon announced plans to reduce its corporate workforce by 14,000 positions - reported as the largest round of job cuts since 2022 - followed in January 2026 by a second round affecting approximately 16,000 corporate employees, partly attributed to the adoption of artificial intelligence.

• 6. Prime and Its Gravity

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  Amazon Prime began as a shipping convenience and became something closer to an economic anchor. By 2021, it had 200 million subscribers worldwide, and its growth was significant enough that Amazon surpassed Walmart that year as the world's largest retailer outside China. Prime now bundles streaming video through Amazon Prime Video and MGM+, music through Amazon Music, audiobooks through Audible, and same-day or next-day delivery for millions of items. In January 2023, Amazon launched RXPass, which for a $5 monthly fee gives US Prime members access to 60 medications. Amazon's paid subscription services account for roughly 7% of total sales by segment. Annual visits to amazon.com grew from 615 million in 2008 to more than 2 billion per month in 2022. The site now generates 69.3% of its sales from the United States, with Germany at 6.5% and the United Kingdom at 5.8%. Amazon's market capitalization crossed $1 trillion again in early February 2020. For fiscal year 2024, the company reported revenue of $637.9 billion and net income of $59.2 billion, up from a net loss of $2.7 billion in 2022 - a swing that reflects how much the business can amplify in both directions.

• 7. Criticism and Contested Power

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  Bezos defended negative product reviews in Amazon's early years by saying the company was "taking a different approach" and wanted to let truth loose, making every book available "the good, the bad and the ugly". That stated openness has been challenged repeatedly by the company's own decisions. Amazon came under criticism after emails surfaced showing the company had, under pressure from the Biden Administration, reduced the visibility of books critical of the COVID-19 vaccine. The company has also faced long-running controversy over its Ring subsidiary providing law enforcement with home security footage without a warrant - a practice Ring halted in 2024, earning cautious acknowledgment from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Amazon's Project Nimbus, a contract to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to Israel and its military alongside Google, drew internal protests; in October 2025, Amazon suspended an employee who posted messages criticizing the project in a company Slack channel and wrote a letter to CEO Andy Jassy. The company's private-label strategy has generated scrutiny of a different kind: Amazon owns 34 private-label brands, yet these brands account for only 0.15% of global sales, compared to an average of 18% for other large retailers. Meanwhile, Bezos separately owns The Washington Post through Nash Holdings, and has continued selling Amazon shares, with a plan adopted in November 2023 to sell approximately 50 million shares over the following year, beginning with a sale of 12 million shares for about $2 billion.

• 8. The Infrastructure Horizon

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  In February 2026, Amazon announced plans to invest $12 billion in Louisiana to build data centers there, a project expected to create 540 full-time jobs. In March 2026, the company signed an energy pledge at the White House committing it to bear the costs of new electricity generation to power those facilities. Amazon also has plans to fund four small nuclear reactors at the Xe-100 reactor site in Eastern Washington, and is investing in a new plant in Alberta, Canada. Alongside Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft, Amazon is expected to collectively invest about $650 billion in AI-related infrastructure in 2026, according to an analysis by Bridgewater Associates. At the same time, the company is exploring a potential investment of up to $50 billion in OpenAI, even as it maintains a deep strategic partnership with Anthropic, OpenAI's competitor. On the 22nd of July 2025, Amazon announced plans to acquire Bee AI, a San Francisco startup whose wristband records conversations throughout the day. The combination of a satellite internet constellation through Kuiper Systems, a self-driving subsidiary in Zoox, prescription vending machines at One Medical clinics, and a household robot called Astro suggests that the garage in Bellevue - and the online bookstore it housed - was only ever the smallest hint of what was being built.