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In the business world there are fewer big topics than Amazon. It started as a retail website in 1995 selling books. From there, it grew to, well you know this, it sells most of the things you could buy at a mall and the grocery store. It has online content. It offers cloud computing and it's still not only sells books, it helps people publish them. In September, Amazon's total market value passed $1 trillion. It's the second company to do that behind Apple and Amazon did it in just 24 years.

In January, Amazon Jeff Bezos became the richest person on earth. His net worth according to the Forbes Business Media Company is around $160 billion, give or take but there have been bumps in the road. The company's been criticized for what it pays it's employees for one thing. Last year, Amazon said the median pay for them was just over $28,000. That means half the people who work for Amazon worldwide made less than that. Thousands of retail stores have closed over the past year and retail jobs have been lost because many shoppers have been spending less time browsing in stores and more time browsing on sites like Amazon.

And privacy advocates say Amazon's Echo device is always listening, raising concerns about who else could hear your conversations besides Alexa. The company is huge. It now has more than half a million employees worldwide. It's complicated, like some of the challenges it's faced in creating. It's also changing the way the world buys goods.