Jeff Bezos says Amazon employees shouldn’t celebrate what was never the goal

Jeff Bezos has just been handed the one milestone most founders would frame and hang on a wall, and his response was to wave it off. Speaking to Fortune from the original door-slab desk he built in his Bellevue garage in 1995, now sitting in his Washington, D.C., study, the Amazon founder said bigness was never the objective. “I don’t want us to take pride in being big,” he said, adding that the pride should sit with serving customers, and that growth follows from doing that well. The comment lands as Amazon takes the No. 1 spot on Fortune’s Global 500, making it the largest company in the world by revenue and ending Walmart’s decade-plus run at the top. Bezos told Fortune the outcome was not a complete surprise, which is a very Bezos way of saying he had done the math. Amazon is now valued at about $2.6 trillion and is widely expected to become the first company to cross $1 trillion in annual revenue.Amazon tops the Fortune Global 500 as the world’s biggest company by revenueThe scale is easier to feel than to picture. Amazon reportedly delivers as many packages as the U.S. Postal Service, AWS underpins roughly a third of the internet, and Prime has swollen into a 200-million-subscriber habit. Bezos used the phrase “customer obsession” ten times during the Fortune conversation, which tells you how much of the company’s operating logic still runs through it. A lot of companies claim to be customer-obsessed, he said, when they are really competitor-obsessed.Amazon AI capex hits $200 billion as Bezos calls silicon the next pillarThe bigger story is where the money is going. Amazon spent $131 billion on capital expenditure in 2025 and expects to spend around $200 billion in 2026, most of it on AWS and generative AI. Bezos said the chips business is lining up to become Amazon’s next durable pillar, alongside Marketplace, Prime and AWS, and confirmed that Trainium4 arrives next year. Amazon has also committed up to $25 billion to Anthropic, which will buy more than $100 billion of its cloud services in return.There is evidence the bet is working. Jassy said on the first-quarter earnings call that AWS’s AI revenue run rate passed $15 billion in three years, roughly 260 times what AWS itself was doing at the same age.FTC lawsuit, 30,000 job cuts and the risks to Amazon’s customer obsessionNot everyone is applauding. The FTC and 17 states sued Amazon in 2023 over alleged anticompetitive conduct, with trial expected in 2027, and the company has cut nearly 30,000 corporate roles in the past year. Bezos named the real threat himself: stop obsessing over customers, stop inventing, start making short-term trades, and Amazon could coast for a while before losing.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.