When the conglomerate Hachette, with which I’d once published a book, refused to accede to Amazon’s demands, it was punished. I felt anxious about how the company bullied the book business, extracting ever more favorable terms from the publishers that had come to depend on it. I first grew concerned about Amazon’s power five years ago. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day.

One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry-institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers.

More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Īt 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith.

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