For Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, the COVID-19 pandemic has been great for business, leading to record profits and an increased market share. Perhaps more significantly, the pandemic has accelerated the reshuffling of transnational corporate power with enormous consequences for the future of work, labor, and the global economy.

Amazon’s immense power and influence over the world’s economy — a phenomenon we have described as “Amazon capitalism” — was already rising rapidly. However, the pandemic has ushered in the latest iteration of capitalist crisis and further propelled Amazon’s rise as the world’s most powerful corporation. By mid-2020, the corporation’s market cap had increased to $1.58 trillion (surpassing Microsoft) as demand for its delivery and cloud services surged.

While the global COVID-19 body count neared one million deaths, the demand for home-delivered e-commerce peaked — as did the personal fortune of Jeff Bezos, who became the first person in world history to amass a net worth of over $200 billion. As millions of workers were laid off during the pandemic, Amazon engaged in a “hiring frenzy,” taking on nearly four hundred thousand more “essential workers” since 2019, bringing Amazon’s (directly employed) workforce to over one million workers.

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