https://gizmodo.com/every-company-that-amazon-has-acquired-in-20-years-1849142527By Shoshana Wodinsky
8/05/22
If you’ve ever tried to research how the Big Bad Tech Monopolies of our time got so big and bad, you’ll find that these stories are typically pretty straightforward. Google, for example, started as a search engine company in the mid-90's, and spent decades buying and bullying competitors until it swallowed just about all of the search engine market. Facebook started as a social network, and then copied or bought out the competition until it became the most popular social network on the planet. But Amazon... well, Amazon’s a bit different.
When a younger (and less bald) Jeff Bezos opened the platform to the public in 1995, he promoted it as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore”; it was an e-alternative to the Barnes & Nobles and Waldenbooks people knew and loved. In 2022, it moved on from bookstore to “everything store,” but even that doesn’t fully describe the scope of what Amazon is.
The same company also controls a third of the world’s cloud computing tech while also being a market leader in home security systems. It develops vaccines and drones and is equally cozy with law enforcement and luxury clothing brands, and owns the leading platforms for gamers, movie buffs, and deeply dehumanizing on-demand labor. In 2019, the company’s sprawling worldwide warehouse presence took up more than 38 Pentagons-worth of physical space. Over the past two years, that footprint’s nearly doubled.
In other words, this company is big—arguably too big—in a way that makes keeping tabs on all of Amazon’s brands and businesses a near-impossible ask. So we did it for you.
Using public records, we’ve done our best to catalogue the brands, businesses and subsidiaries that Amazon’s bought and built up as part of its relentless quest to take over anything and everything it can.
(Much more at the link.)
