Amazon Takes Forbes' Best Companies Crown Amid 30,000 Job Cuts

Forbes named Amazon the best company in America for 2027, one year after the retailer eliminated roughly 30,000 corporate jobs. The Seattle-based company moved up from No. 2 and displaced Apple, which now sits behind the top spot it failed to retain.

The ranking touches employer-brand and people-process decisions directly. Forbes scores thousands of the largest U.S. public and private companies on customer and employee sentiment, financial performance, creditworthiness, cybersecurity and innovation, working with 12 data organizations to build the index, now in its third year.

For people leaders, the headline tension is plain: the company with the top composite score spent the same period cutting corporate headcount at scale.

What lifted Amazon to No. 1?

Forbes credited three factors: Amazon's financial strength and size, its standing in news and social media, and the range of voices across the company and its leadership. Apple, by contrast, scored especially well on employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, financial strength and innovation.

The publication also highlighted speed. It cited a feature that lets customers shop by text message; an employee suggested the idea in October, and it launched Nov. 6.

"Innovating for customers, doing it fast, working backwards from their needs, that's really at our core," Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people, experience and technology, told Forbes.

The caveat is obvious. "Range of voices across the company" is a survey-derived signal, not an audit, and Forbes did not publish the underlying employee-sentiment scores. The index also blends workforce measures with creditworthiness and cybersecurity, so the top rank is not a verdict on workplace quality alone. In plain words: the No. 1 label covers far more than how employees are treated.

What does the rest of the top 10 look like?

Three other Washington state companies landed in the top 50:

• Microsoft at No. 6
• Costco at No. 13
• Alaska Air Group at No. 39

Berkshire Hathaway, last year's No. 1, slipped to No. 4. Nvidia ranked No. 3 on the same day CEO Jensen Huang resigned, following his admission of an extramarital affair. JPMorganChase, Alphabet, Royal Caribbean Group, Walmart and Marriott International round out the top 10.

The Nvidia case shows how little separates adjacent ranks: a leadership scandal and a resignation barely moved a company Forbes otherwise rates highly. Rankings this compressed reward scrutiny of methodology, not just position.

How does the award square with the layoffs?

In its own blog post Thursday, Amazon highlighted faster delivery, custom AI chips, warehouse robotics and higher pay for frontline workers.

The timeline complicates that narrative. Amazon eliminated about 30,000 corporate jobs in rounds announced in October 2025 and January 2026, including more than 4,500 in Washington state. Smaller cuts followed throughout the year, including layoffs of fewer than 1,000 corporate employees in October, mainly in its Stores unit.

So the award spans a period in which corporate headcount fell sharply even as frontline pay rose. Amazon's blog post did not address the corporate reductions, and Forbes' cited explanation does not say how, or whether, layoff activity was weighted in the employee-sentiment component. In plain words: the parts of the workforce that were cut are largely absent from the celebration.

What should HR leaders take from it?

Two signals matter for recruiting and retention teams. First, employer-brand rankings can coexist with large-scale workforce reductions, which means a high rank should not be read as internal stability. Second, Forbes' employee-sentiment inputs come from external data partners rather than the company itself, so the signal reflects public perception as much as internal reality.

For Amazon, the No. 1 position arrives as it rebuilds corporate teams after a year of cuts, and future rankings will show whether employee sentiment holds under that combination of investment and contraction.