bezos basically wants to own the whole economy right you think he will i kind of think he will i kind of think that in like 10 years jeff bezos owns every single thing there is amazon's is trillion dollar tech company closing 30 percent of our stores and malls and paying zero in taxes how much of the internet do you run it's a good question it's a lot though when jeff bezos founded amazon he originally considered naming it relentless and even registered the domain name relentless.com which is still active to this day however when friends told
him the name sounded a bit sinister he changed it fast forward to present day and bezos is the richest man in modern history and has gone from being one man in an office to running a trillion dollar global empire and what the story of bezos and amazon is undeniably inspiring the real question is where does this story end because now more than ever the name relentless seems like the perfect fit amazon is expanding its presence in the smart home market the e-commerce giant announced yesterday it has officially closed the deal to buy the home security
device company ring it's a reported 1 billion dollar acquisition sold the washington post for 250 million dollars to amazon founder and ceo jeff bezos amazon this week announcing a very big move into the pharmacy business it sent shockwaves through the industry one billion dollar acquisition of pillpack amazon making a big deal in the self-driving car space the price that amazon paid was north of a billion dollars and sold it to amazon for over a billion dollars amazon is buying whole foods for nearly 14 billion dollars it's time to go back to the moon this time
to stay okay let's back up a little amazon started from humble beginnings in 1994 selling books on the internet and they even used to ring a bell in the office every time they got a sale but over the next couple of decades amazon expanded into almost every product category there is earning it the nickname the everything store with well over 350 million different products available to buy and when you think of amazon this is probably what comes to mind amazon.com the online e-commerce giants however the shopping component of amazon is just a tiny fraction of
what it does and sure it's normal for businesses to buy out competitors and expand into new markets but let's just take a step back to see exactly how large bezos amazon empire actually is and what that could mean for our future for a start they have amazon web services their computing and cloud services business that essentially powers a huge portion of the entire internet including netflix twitch facebook twitter and even the cia in fact when aws has a major outage it can sort of feel like the internet is down and even vacuums and doorbells on
the network can stop working amazon has also entered the streaming service business buying the rights to not only many thousands of popular movies tv shows and live events but also creating their own originals in fact amazon studios became the first streaming service to receive a best picture oscar nomination for one of its original movies amazon is represented at the academy awards amazon is the first streaming service nominated for best picture and the golden globe goes to transparent amazon video i want to thank amazon jeff bezos to amazon my new best friend uh jeff bezos is
here oh wow great actor jeff bezos is so rich he got divorced and he's still the richest man in the world and with billions more dollars reportedly due to be spent next year it seems production will keep expanding and they aren't just stopping at video streaming they're big players in the music streaming space too taking on the likes of spotify and apple music which fits very nicely with the fact amazon is also one of the industry leaders in the smart speaker markets and suddenly you start to realize the genius here in the way that so
many of their products and services interlink if you become a member of their subscription service amazon prime you become part of the amazon ecosystem you probably buy a fire stick to watch your prime video movies which you can control with your amazon alexa which you bought from amazon.com which runs on amazon web services there's this synergy between everything that means once you're in you're unlikely to leave because everything is connected and this is just going to keep expanding for example they've announced plans for an online pharmacy with discount farmer prices available for prime members and
as amazon systematically tries to embed itself in almost every area of your life from managing your photos to delivering your groceries it's understandable some people have concerns about the sheer amount of data amazon is going to have on you but the thing is right now we're just talking about some of the popular consumer products and services under the amazon label in terms of amazon's overall empire we haven't even begun to scratch the surface yet for example amazon are developing cutting-edge ai facial recognition technology that they're selling direct to law enforcement which on one hand is
helping police find criminals but on the other hand is largely untested and unregulated yep they've also had talks about selling it to immigrations and customs enforcement and the us military bezos himself has made it clear that he sees amazon playing a critical role in national security as well as in commerce we are going to continue to support the dod and i think we should and if if big tech companies are going to turn their back on the us department of defense this country is going to be in trouble and this isn't amazon's first dealing in
this area at all a bbc documentary about amazon claimed that police have turned into even salespeople for amazon ring a product which markets itself as a smart video doorbell with a built-in camera and wi-fi the police are now recommending to people for security [Music] amazon are also currently working on other futuristic projects like drone deliveries and ai robots for the home ironically in 2018 a guardian article wrote that of the top 10 us industries by gdp amazon has a finger in all but real estate in 2019 articles started popping up about amazon entering real estates
even websites you may currently use yourself like imdb and goodreads are subsidiaries of amazon the thing is bezos has managed to brand amazon in a way where no market is off limits for them it's dangerous not to evolve if you want to ensure your extinction cease to evolve in other words they have incredible brand elasticity where amazon can enter any market and people will go yeah i guess that makes sense for example if other huge brands like coca-cola or samsung said they were opening physical grocery stores it would be kind of weird but when amazon
say that it's not even surprising which brings us on to amazon's plans to not just beat the high street but to become the high streets in case you haven't seen amazon is planning to reinvent the physical shopping experience as well [Music] no lines no checkout no seriously likewise when you hear amazon are planning to launch more than 3 000 satellites into orbit to supply the world with high-speed internet that's not that surprising either same with their plans for a three million square foot air hub for the fleets of planes they've been buying or their purchase
of self-driving car company zoox again whilst these big projects all seem unrelated you can also see how these different pieces may or later connect together for example driverless vehicles delivering your amazon packages because vertical integration is definitely at the heart of amazon's success they essentially want to own the whole supply chain they want to make the products themselves store the products themselves sell the products through their own platform accept payment with their own payment gateway and then deliver the products with their own delivery teams and i just want to be clear from a customer perspective
i love amazon i think what they're doing is exciting and obviously i don't actually think bezos is some kind of super villain even if he does look a bit like one but i do think it's easy to see why there's some concern about bezos entering so many different markets given the incredible amount of resources he and amazon have and no currently they don't match the definition of a monopoly in any of the markets they're in because they do have plenty of competition in fact amazon's competition is almost everyone however what some people think is the
problem is that so many of their competitors depend on amazon a lot of their competitors use amazon web services or sell their products through amazon.com third-party seller marketplace and whilst they technically have the choice to do that let's look at an example many book publishers have had negotiations with amazon over ebook pricing to which amazon can essentially dictate the price they want because if the publishers don't agree amazon can simply stop showing the books from that publisher causing their sales to tank since most people buy books from amazon likewise with individuals selling their own products
through amazon many have reported that if they find a hip product that's selling well amazon will simply create their own version of the product and show it higher up in search results and if the original seller lowers their prices to try and compete amazon will just lower their price as well in fact for many years amazon prioritized growth over profit and have a track record of temporarily making a lot on items in order to be cheaper than competitors so competitors go out of business and then amazon can re-raise their prices if they want and while
this can be harsh it's nothing new some economists would say it's simply good business but others may say amazon being both a platform and a retailer that sells through that same platform is a dangerous conflict of interests and that the anti-competitive tactics used by amazon are cause for concern we're going to price products competitively and if that means on that product that we lose money that's okay and of course given amazon seemingly infinite resources and connections it's not exactly unrealistic to imagine that amazon's dominance in almost every market is going to keep growing and growing
until jeff bezos essentially wins capitalism so you could argue amazon's biggest competition and threat is probably the government and some senior figures are already raising big concerns about amazon's dominance technically amazon don't violate any anti-trust laws right now but that's partly because their tactics hurt other businesses not customers in fact amazon's leverage over its competitors is mostly leading to lower prices for the end consumer so it raises the interesting question of whether amazon's continued growth is a good thing some people would say if amazon keep innovating keep lowering prices keep improving delivery speeds then that's
what matters after all they are renowned for incredible customer service and putting the consumer first but some other people would say at what cost are their employees being treated fairly to achieve those great results and if independent stores can't compete does that hurt our communities and small business owners especially when you consider amazon get massive tax breaks for their innovative programs which small businesses simply can't compete with additionally some people argue that the vast amount of data amazon has on everyone from all these different companies and products they have allows them to understand consumers in
a way that most companies simply can't which will allow amazon to continually stay ahead of the game and finally in even more extreme cases some people would argue we should all be wary of trusting amazon at all rachel greer worked in product safety at amazon and worried that the site was being flooded with untested and potentially unsafe products are there proper warnings has it been safety tested for durability if a child chews on it will the paint come off is that paint leaded most people would assume that there is a pretty high safety standard on
amazon and that assumption would be incorrect more than half of all sales on amazon's main shopping site come from third party sellers who send their items into amazon and amazon handle the rest because of their incredible infrastructure but amazon's terms and conditions state third-party sellers are responsible for the safety of these items not amazon themselves and this concerns some people because a lot of these third-party sellers are not big established businesses they're just random individuals trying to make some money on the side and so if they send in counterfeit or faulty items it's entirely possible
they will get mixed in with genuine items in the amazon warehouse and so you're never fully sure who provided the item you're buying and whether it's authentic and again i just want to stress i buy from amazon regularly and i don't mean this as an attack on amazon but i do think all of this is interesting to consider if amazon is going to have so much control and power do they also need more responsibility i'd be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments however for me personally the final and most interesting question of all
is what is jeff bezos's end game admittedly most of his wealth is currently tied up in shares but there's still no question that he has more money than anyone could ever spend in a lifetime and yet he continues to work incredibly hard and shows no signs of slowing down at all i think it's clear bezos wants to keep expanding into even more industries and keep buying out even more companies in other words he wants to stay relentless and this has actually led to him coming under a lot of scrutiny recently especially as he doesn't seem
to give as much of his money away to charity as some might expect amazon's top guy jeff bezos he has donated 690 000 to the australian wildlife recovery fund i guess you can call it he's getting slammed for it because people think that he should have given more well he gave nearly 150 million dollars to charitable causes last year as well but some say that's not enough so you start to wonder what is he going to do with all that wealth and power and this could be the answer i think the most important work that
i'm doing and i get increasing conviction on this with every passing year is the work i'm doing at blue origin on space travel even from just five years old bezos says he's been fascinated by the idea of space travel and so is spending an increasing amount of time and money on his space company blue origin according to their website they say we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy and so you start to think that perhaps world domination is not the end goal for jeff bezos at least not this world [Music]
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