Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Wednesday led his last shareholder meeting as CEO, announcing the date on which he'll pass the reins to his replacement while highlighting challenges going forward and pushing back against claims that Amazon has become too big and powerful.
With the acquisition, Amazon hopes to leverage MGM’s catalog of some 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows—including such iconic titles as “Robocop,” “Rocky,” and the James Bond movies—to help bolster Amazon Studios in its streaming war with competitors like Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix.
He also said Amazon is looking to make other big investments as it seeks to grow and out-compete rivals.
“None of these ideas are guaranteed to work,” Bezos cautioned, CNBC reported. “All of them are gigantic investments and they’re all risks ... The only way to get above-average returns is to take risks and many won’t pay off,” he added.
“Our whole history as a company is about taking risks, many of which have failed and many of which will fail, but we’ll continue to take big risks,” he said.
“Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs,“ said District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine, a Democrat, in a statement. ”It maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation, and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor,” he added.
Asked to respond to criticism that Amazon has become too big and powerful, Bezos insisted his company continues to face stiff competition in all its markets, including in cloud computing and retail.
“Consumers can shop at dozens of large national retailers, hundreds of regional retailers, hundreds of thousands of small retailers both online and in store,” Bezos said, according to CNBC. “It’s a very healthy industry and far from a winner-take-all situation and we are still a small fraction of retail.”
“Amazon takes pride in the fact that we offer low prices across the broadest selection, and like any store, we reserve the right not to highlight offers to customers that are not priced competitively. The relief the AG seeks would force Amazon to feature higher prices to customers, oddly going against core objectives of antitrust law,” the spokesperson said.
It comes as Republicans have grown increasingly vocal about wanting to curtail the power of Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google, blaming them for abusing their dominant market positions and of using their influence to stifle conservative voices.
“Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon have been coddled by Washington politicians for years,“ Hawley said in a statement. ”This treatment has allowed them to amass colossal amounts of power that they use to censor political opinions that they don’t agree with and shut out competitors who offer consumers an alternative to the status quo,” Hawley added.
Amazon runs Amazon Web Services (AWS), which courted controversy earlier this year after de-platforming “free speech” social media website Parler while still hosting Parler competitor Twitter on AWS.
“It’s past time to bust up Big Tech companies, restore competition, and give power back the American consumers,” Hawley said.
Certain “flawed regulatory ideas rely on the false narrative that Amazon’s interests are not aligned with those of the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses thriving as sellers in our store,” stated the blog post, which was written by “Amazon staff.”
“The opposite is true: Amazon and sellers complement each other, and together we create a better customer experience than either could create alone,” the company said.
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