Jeff Bezos Amazon & The Quest for World Domination (SHOULD WE BE SCARED?)
It's safe to say that I like Amazon and admire what Jeff Bezos (Amazon Founder) has created ...
It allowed me to start a business while working a 9-5, quit my job and train thousands of people around the world how to do the same.
HOWEVER ...
With a company as big as Amazon there are always things that scare me ...
Like, should one company have so much power?
Amazon is EVERYWHERE.
And even if you do not shop on Amazon it's extremely likely that you do ... without even knowing it.
Over the past few weeks I've been putting together a short documentary answering the question:
How scared should we be of Jeff Bezos the Amazon CEO?
Will he become the worlds first trillionaire?
I'll show you just how rich Jeff is, how Amazon has taken over the internet and potentially even your government.
when did you last use amazon last month to get your dad a last minute birthday gift last week to pick up your supplies for a summer holiday last night streaming some late night TV to help you sleep after a long shift at work or maybe you needed cough medicine for your kid or Nicorette to beat your habit maybe you needed a face mask to erase the creeping fear you still feel when you venture out on public transport way back in 1994 when Jeff Bezos the man who founded amazon was coming up with concepts for his new business he had a different name for his idea back then he called it the everything
store according to a book on amazon by the business journalist brad stone Jeff Bezos originally wanted to build a site that sold basically every type of product all over the world the name changed before he actually launched his business but in a lot of ways the idea didn’t today amazon is creeping further and further into every aspect of our lives your gifts your impulse buys your TV your music and your healthcare over 6500 government agencies are using amazon web services amazon is gathering your data your clicks your preferences maybe even your voice meanwhile in 2019 amazon logs over 280 billion in sales and experts think Jeff Bezos is on course to become the world’s first trillion this didn’t all happen by accident how did amazon grow so fast how did it get so much smarter than everyone else could amazon be learning about you observing you listening to you right now in this video I’m going to show you how a website that sold books seeped into every corner of the online economy and started running so much of your life I’m going to tell you just how rich Jeff Bezos is which one newspaper called earths first trillion dollar psychopath and I’m going to show you just how ruthless he had to be to get there I’m also going to answer a question that probably already been gnawing at the back of your mind if amazon is taking over the world just how scared should you be what are we gonna do tomorrow night same thing we do every night pinky try to take over the world part one how amazon bought and sold everything maybe you don’t shop at amazon that much maybe you even think you don’t shop there at all think again amazon is everywhere in this section.
I’m going to explain how it took over the internet how it spread further and further sold more and more and how you’re probably helping amazon get richer even if you don’t realize it but first back to the start from its very beginnings the story of amazon has had one overarching theme total domination in 1994 Jeff Bezos wasn’t in a position to build the everything store so he built a bookstore if you’re as old as I am you might remember the days where amazon only sold books but Bezos didn’t just build any bookstore he built a bookstore to end all bookstores the idea was to stock more than everyone else and deliver it to anyone it went live in 1995 it grew and grew it stopped and sold more and more today amazon makes up nearly half of the physical book market and almost all of the eBook market in the us meanwhile how many bookstores do you see on your local high street nowadays total domination world domination same old dream but Bezos didn’t stop there in 1999 amazon began to stock more and more
stuff electronics toys kitchenware video games more and more by 2018 amazon represented almost half of the entire e-commerce industry in the US if you’re buying online chances are you’re buying there total domination in 2006 amazon launched amazon web services amazon web services provides the digital building blocks to help people build and run various online services and this was the moment where amazon stopped just being a shop and started to creep across the whole internet remember at the beginning of this section I said you probably help amazon make money even if you think you don’t shop there well let me ask you something do you watch Netflix do you use snap chat do you buy products from apple book holidays on earbob or use slack for work all these huge tech companies and more have splash cash on amazon web services and maybe you’re a total tech industry holdout and steer clear of all these companies my phone is it’s so old oh my god that phone is preposterous it’s getting more and more likely that amazon can work with essential services you use wherever you live amazon web services has supported medical clinics in Italy classrooms in India the US food and drug administration and a lot more much more more and more and more and more total domination still think you don’t shop at amazon nope if you dent now chances are you will soon.
There’s only one thing better than owning a vault full of cold hard cash and that swimming in it part two the riches of Jeff Bezos how much money did you make last year enough enough to pay the bills enough to pay rent and buy food enough to stop you jolting awake anxious in the middle of the night enough to do whatever you want Jeff Bezos has made more money than you could possibly imagine
Jeff Bezos has made more than enough in this section I’m going to show you just how much we can get some understanding of Jeff Bezos’s unimaginable wealth with the help of a mind-boggling data visualization let’s say this box here represents 63 179 why that much well that the median income of
American household or in plain language a US household that sits right in the middle of the pile not rich not poor normal now look at this square little bit bigger right this square is all the money an average American is going to earn from the day they’re born until the day they die 1.7 million dollars sounds like a lot but of course in that time they’ve bought food homes holidays wedding rings giving cash to their kids still it’s okay and it’s the very best a lot of us could hope for now look at this square much bigger right much much bigger than that 1.7 million many people can hope to earn this represents the wealth of Tim cook the of apple his company makes the IPhone which sits in hundreds of millions of pockets worldwide he is a very rich man his wealth comes to 625 million but if we take this square and compare it to Jeff Bezos’s then we have to zoom out and out and out until all of Tim cooks millions are an invisible dot compared to everything. Jeff Bezos has enough to for example eradicate malaria a disease which kills 800 children a day more than enough does he deserve it well I’ll show you something else we need to zoom all the way back in past the wealth of Tim cook pass the lifetime earnings of an American pass the annual earnings of American to this box just here this box represents the annual pay of an amazon warehouse worker Jeff Bezos’s wealth is built on the backs of a huge army of people that you’ve never heard of who package your goods who work hard and fast in grueling conditions amazon says it takes his work as welfare seriously with good safety standards and it recently raised its minimum wage in the us to 15 an hour but can one man really be worth so many times more than the men and women that work for him amazon thinks that 15 is more than enough is it enough do you know how much power id have to give up to be president part three so how scared should we be what could amazon and Jeff Bezos do to you that one question when a company is this huge what kind of power does that give them power over your life your country your industry in this section well look at that power that could be used for good or for real evil and we’ll try to answer another question how scared should you be at the heart of Jeff Bezos’s and amazons power is data because amazon knows a lot about you and in the new online knowledge economy that what counts the journalist leo kellyanne got hold of the data amazon holds on him it came to hundreds of files right down to transcripts of the interactions his family had with their voice activated amazon echo speakers it knew his daughter was obsessed with the movie frozen according to kellyanne it held late night music requests from the bedroom that could be a clue to more adult activity.
Jeff Bezos says the key to amazons success is customer obsession the more amazon can figure out what customers want the better a job it can do for them and this data gathering can help amazon do amazing things during the coronavirus pandemic it has helped the world health organization share data with governments and health workers and of course it means amazon can help you find and buy what you want faster but some people think this kind of power is unacceptable that the balance is tipped too far towards amazon Shoshanna a Harvard professor told the BBC that amazon is like a medieval elite a priesthood that had all the knowledge that elite did what it wanted while all the rest of the people just kind of groped around in the dark because the answer to that question what could amazon and Jeff Bezos do to you is that we don’t really know in the long run I think you can argue that Jeff Bezos is at least partially a good guy he wants to fly humankind back to the moon has investing some of that huge wealth we looked at in good causes he wants to build new kinds of schools and whilst his drive his ruthlessness his love of confrontation rub people up the wrong way there’s a lot that business people can learn from his passion for unconventional thinking but in the long run it isn’t just about Jeff Bezos
amazon has used its amazing data gathering abilities to develop a technology called recognition it can identify people from images and videos and even read the emotions that show on their face it knows if you look happy and it knows if you look scared we cant even guess at all the possible ways that technology could be used by a company or by a government and that just one of the impossible number of things that amazon and all of its different elements can do so how scared should you be I’ll leave it up to you to decide if amazon right now is a force of evil or for good if Jeff Bezos is a superhero or a super villain or a bit of both but something to me that is definitely scary is that if we let one company become the everything store one place holding all our products all our projects all our data if we give amazon the keys to more and more of the internet if Jeff Bezos keeps earning more than could possibly be enough for one man then how can anyone ever know understand or control what amazon does it puts them beyond you beyond your government beyond their competition so when did you last use amazon for many of you the answer will be that you’re using it right now so how comfortable are you with that
hey its Johnny Bradley here and if you’ve enjoyed this video and you want to see any more topics discussed please let me know down in the comments I’ve thoroughly enjoyed putting together this mini documentary for you so if you did enjoy it is really appreciate a comment a like and a subscribe with them notifications turned on and if you think someone else will find it interesting please do share it with
them as well and for all you existing subscribers I'd love to know what you think as well so let me know that is it for today but remember Jeff is always listening.
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