Amazon's army: Amazon now has 1.3 million employees, we explore how that has grown over time

Jeff Bezos has written his final shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon, the e-commerce company he started in 1995. Although he discusses the business, a significant focus of the letter is Amazon's employee base, which has been in the headlines a lot this year.

First the company denied that delivery drivers and other employees occasionally had to pee in bottles while at work in order to meet busy schedules, and then there was the battle to unionize in Alabama, which Amazon won.

It's perhaps no surprise that things with your employees sometimes go wrong when you have a workforce of 1.3 million people and a population the equivalent of the entire city of Atlanta (~500,000) joined your company last year alone. It's hard to make 13 employees 100% happy, let alone 1.3 million.

Nevertheless, this is really the Amazon founder's first admission that things could be improved for employees, with Bezos writing that "I think we need to do a better job for our employees". It doesn't get much more direct than that, perhaps Bezos 2.0 will change his customer-obsession into an employee-obsession.