Amazon. If you don’t know what it is by now, you’re most likely hiding from the government in a secret bunker somewhere. If you are this kind of person, let me explain. Amazon.com Inc. is an American multinational technology company that mostly deals with ecommerce and/or the art of buying and selling things online. Sounds simple, right? Wrong.  It’s much more complicated than that. Although Amazon’s main focus is ecommerce, it also deals with cloud computing, digital streaming and artificial intelligence. According to forbes.com, Jeff Bezos created the company in 1994 as an online marketplace for books, but it has expanded to sell just about anything. 

As a company, Amazon holds over 40 subsidiaries, some of which are Audible, Whole Foods Market, Ring and Twitch. When you consider this, just how much of our daily lives does Amazon have access to? From just these four companies, Amazon is able to look into what we read, what we eat, where we live and what we watch. No one person should have access to this much information. 

Amazon is no stranger to controversies either, with some of their most popular ones being supplying law enforcement with facial recognition tools, forming cloud computing partnerships with the CIA and exposing their warehouse employees to unsafe working conditions. Considering that Jeff Bezos has a net worth of over 200 billion dollars (making him the richest man alive), I’d assume that he could spare a small bit to create better working conditions for his employees. 

Seriously, though, what can one man do with 200 billion dollars? He could send 8,861 kids to ivy league schools to get their bachelor degrees; he could solve Flint, Michigan’s water crisis 2,000 times over; he could eradicate homelessness in the U.S with a tenth of his fortune and he could also buy the moon. Yes, the moon, and still have 20 billion dollars spare. No man should be this wealthy while people are struggling to make ends meet every year.

All in all, Amazon is creating a monopoly that is whittling away its competition within the economy, sooner than later, making it one of the only choices for ecommerce and maybe commerce in general. Are you scared? You should be. All hail Jeff Bezos.