On Thursday, the e-commerce retailer revealed that it employed 541,900 people at the end of the third quarter. That's bigger than the populations of some 63 countries and territories around the world, including well known ones such as Iceland, the Bahamas, and Monaco. Belize, for example, has a population of just 347,369.

As we can see in this chart from Statista, which is based on data from the the company itself, Amazon has been growing at a rapid rate. It added 159,500 people just in the three months between the end of June and the end of September.

Many of those came through its acquisition of Whole Foods, but Amazon hired tens of thousands of additional workers besides.

And it's not stopping there. The internet giant also announced plans to hire 120,000 seasonal workers this holiday season to bulk up its US warehouses and customer service centres and said it expects to make many of those hires full-time workers. Meanwhile, the company has said when it opens its second headquarters, it plans to add as many as 50,000 jobs there.

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