The Bully and the Builder: Why Elizabeth Warren Wants to Smash Amazon

While engineers work to strengthen our digital world, political bullies like Elizabeth Warren seek only to tear it down

Anyone who has ever built or fixed something knows it is far more difficult than breaking things. Every child learns this when protecting a hard-earned sandcastle against a bully. Yet, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a vocal bully motivated to break up Big Tech, ignores this life lesson.

When an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused a tremor across the internet on Oct. 20, 2025 — disrupting services like Netflix and delaying flights — engineers rushed to rebuild the “castle” and strengthen it for the future. In many postmortems they devised resiliency strategies that any company can now use to mitigate risk.

By contrast, for Warren, the outage was not an opportunity to learn but to swing a kick. Just moments into the incident, she decreed: “If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech.”

Since then, she’s moved on to attack Big Tech for reasons like her disdain for data centers’ energy consumption. We can’t let the bully continue her destructive attack unimpeded.

After Warren’s threat, commentators stepped up to educate her. With only 30 percent market share, AWS cannot affect the “entire internet.” Furthermore, the impact wasn’t catastrophic for customers who chose to insure themselves through a multi-region diversification strategies, whether relying on different cloud providers or alternatives within AWS itself.

But defenders of AWS have too benevolent a view of critics. Simply educating them about market share or elucidating strategic solutions will not persuade Warren to back off. It is like telling a bully that his victim’s exquisite sand castle is not such a big deal.

We must instead stress that Amazon deserves gratitude and admiration for the value its cloud computing provides. AWS offers instant access to storage and processing power on a global scale. It frees everyone from smallest college start-ups to largest enterprises from heavy IT lifting, allowing them to focus on innovation while using world-class infrastructure at a disruptively low cost. Breaking up such an achievement would be profoundly unjust. In other words: Stay away, Warren, you bully.

Warren, an alleged advocate of economic opportunity, should be the greatest AWS fan for how it provides such opportunities on a massive scale. As a U.S. senator, Warren’s job is to protect the rights of builders, not to become their destroyer. Yet she issues threats without blinking. The power of Warren’s position makes her not a mere internet troll, but a mortal threat.

To rationalize the desire to smash, Warren and her allies fantasize that smaller versions of AWS would magically erase technical glitches and make building resiliency unnecessary. But AWS’s value lies precisely in its integrated scale. Disintegration would be a step back to a more primitive time of the internet when every company managed its own data infrastructure and was its own mini-AWS.

Warren’s false portrayal of AWS reveals a grotesque hatred for achievement and a desire to manipulatively recruit others to her destructive cause. We must challenge the true source of such hatred.

Warren and her ilk cannot accept that Amazon, a hugely successful profit-seeking company, is the source of extraordinary value. To them, the Amazons of the world are supposed to exploit us, not provide life-serving values. What else can they feel, if not hatred, when a company like Amazon proves such a worldview glaringly as false?

Unwilling to abandon the hatred of Big Tech, Warren evades the reality that profit-seeking makes values like AWS possible. Without the profit motive to lure Amazon into integrated cloud services, there would be no outage to worry about because there wouldn’t be a system to fail. But facts are an irrelevant bump on Warren’s destructive path. She would rather smash a producer like Amazon, no questions asked, and pretend that the castle it erected will somehow remain.

To defend producers like Amazon against mindless enmity, we must reject the belief that seeking profit is evil – a belief Amazon shatters by being a great productive benefactor. And we must stand up to bullies and proclaim Amazon’s right to pursue profit by creating amazing technology.

Image Credit: Kena Betancur / Stringer / via Getty Images