Do we like Amazon?
Online shop, Prime, Amazon Web Services cloud and devices, based in Seattle, Washington.
Our score: 4 out of 10. Not quite. It is hugely useful, but we'd hesitate to back a firm with a $2.5bn Prime settlement, repeated safety fines, an antitrust trial ahead and rising emissions.
Amazon began as an online bookshop and is now a giant of shopping, cloud computing and delivery. Jeff Bezos founded it, and Andy Jassy took over as CEO in 2021. It employs more than 1.5 million people, and Jassy has been cutting costs hard since taking over.
The big drama was Prime. The FTC accused Amazon of tricking people into signing up and making it hard to cancel. Amazon settled three days into the trial for $2.5bn and admitted no wrongdoing. Refunds are going out automatically, and the FTC has since widened and sped up the payments.
A bigger case is still coming. The FTC and a group of states accuse Amazon of anticompetitive pricing rules, and Amazon denies it. A judge refused Amazon's request to push the trial back in October 2026. Amazon has also been fined in Italy over its marketplace and logistics practices, and in the EU over data protection.
On workers, the US Labor Department's safety regulator OSHA fined Amazon over $60,000 for ergonomic hazards at three warehouses, and Amazon said it didn't reflect reality. California regulators fined it nearly $6m over warehouse quota rules, which Amazon appealed. On top of that came about 30,000 corporate layoffs from October 2025.
On climate there are real wins: it matches all its electricity with clean power and is rolling out electric vans. But total emissions jumped 16% in 2025 because of the AI data-centre boom. Why 4/10? It's a useful company with real scale, but it is fined often and its emissions are heading the wrong way.