Amazon's second employee bids to split company: Report

A founding Amazon employee who was a part of the original team in 1994 has called to split Jeff Bezos's e-commerce empire into two.

According to a report on Business Insider via Recode, Paul Davis, a former programmer at the company, said that the company's core retail business should be separated from its marketplace business for about 2.5 million third-party sellers.

Davis further said that the company has total access to seller and product data on its platform and can use it to shape its own labels. The company denied this charge after its business model came under scrutiny in both the US and the EU, according to the report.

"They're not breaking any agreements. They're just violating what most people would assume was how this is going to work: 'I sell stuff though your system [and] you're not going to steal our sales'," he told Recode.

“There’s clearly a public good to have something that functions like the Amazon Marketplace. … If this didn’t exist, you’d want it to be built,” Davis told Recode.

According to an Amazon statement to Recode, the company gets nearly 60 per cent of its sales from third-party sellers and the company has invested over $15 billion in 2019 alone across infrastructure, tools, services and features to help them succeed.

The company also said that it only uses aggregate seller data to inform users of its own brands during their shopping.

And while Davis says there probably isn't a single piece of code left from when he worked there, he feels emotionally responsible for what the company is today.

He also said that most of the company’s early success should be attributed to Bezos’ intellect, ambition, and drive.