With Amazon poised to become the second U.S. company worth $1 trillion, President Trump and top political figures are intensifying their criticism of the e-commerce giant while showing an increased wariness of the influence wielded by the largest U.S. businesses.
Amazon shares topped $2,000 for the first time on Thursday, and the company ended the week with a market capitalization of $979 billion. It’s still outranked by Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple, which has a value of $1.09 trillion.
The growth hasn’t come without challenges: Trump has accused Amazon of underpaying the U.S. Postal Service to ship its products and mused that the firm and other corporate corporate behemoths such as Google could represent “a very antitrust situation.
“I won’t comment on the breaking up, of whether it’s that or Amazon or Facebook,” he told Bloomberg News.
Congress hasn’t pressed Amazon over such behavior, but the Justice Department’s antitrust division has signaled a willingness to pursue “structural remedies” such as asset sales when it deems companies large enough to be anti-competitive. Regulators recently appealed a ruling allow the merger of AT&T and Time Warner to proceed over the department’s objections.
Later this month, both the House and the Senate will hold hearings with technology executives including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, in which Democrats are likely to inquire about foreign influence operations in this fall’s elections while Republicans question whether conservative views are being suppressed.
Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, pressed the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to reopen an investigation into Google for possible anti-competitive practices, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the one-time Democratic presidential candidate, seized on findings from nonprofit New Food Economy that thousands of Amazon’s employees rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
The Vermont independent — a regular critic of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — pressured the company to provide information on the portion of its workforce contracted through temporary staffing agencies.
“There is something fundamentally wrong when thousands of Amazon workers are on food stamps while their boss, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world,” he said in a tweet.
Amazon, which made $2.5 billion in profits during the last quarter, countered that Sanders was spreading misleading information. The company said its median pay for full-time employees is $34,123 and hourly pay for over 90 percent of its associates tops $15 per hour.
Conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson piled on to Sanders’ criticism, claiming that Bezos was relying on U.S. taxpayers to feed his workers.
“When you see Jeff Bezos, make certain that he says ‘Thank you,’” he told viewers during a segment on his weekday evening show.
Carlson also highlighted the wage practices at Walmart and Uber.
“Conservatives like us support the free market and for good reason: the free market works,” he said. “But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies, they hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There’s nothing conservative about that.”
