Together, the five largest technology companies in the U.S. — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook — are responsible for the creation of more than 1 million jobs between 2000 and 2018, according to a CNBC analysis.
The outlet found that Amazon far outstrips its fellow tech giants in job creation, with the caveat that the company is the only one of the five that reports part-time employee counts along with full-time numbers. As of 2018, Amazon had put 648,000 people to work, far more than the other four firms combined; in the same period, Apple created 132,000 jobs, Microsoft 131,000, Alphabet 99,000 and Facebook 36,000.
Despite Amazon's much higher headcount, Alphabet has experienced the most relative growth: Google's parent company was 347 times larger in 2018 than it was in 2001, while Amazon's 2018 staff was 72 times the size of its workforce in 2000.
Another caveat noted in the analysis is that sizable portions of Amazon and Apple's workforces are not receiving the six-figure software engineer salaries typically associated with big tech. Amazon offers the hundreds of thousands of employees in its fulfillment centers wages starting at $15 per hour, while many included in Apple's headcount are retail and customer service workers in its brick-and-mortar stores.
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