Back in the day when I was at SmugMug, Amazon was desperate for companies to try out its unlikely foray into cloud computing,. It seemed insane to analysts for a retailer to do. They were calling for Jeff Bezos to exit the company.

A young guy, Andy Jassy, who was put in charge of the unlikely venture, visited SmugMug and we cooked him his favorite meal of fried chicken. After a year of trying, Amazon convinced us that their data centers were better than ours so we sold off all our hardware and now they host everything for both SmugMug and Flickr. We love them but I always thought they were ruthless competitors.

Now this:

Amazon Hires From Rivals but Sues Those Who DefectLast week, Amazon sent a stark message to highly paid employees thinking about leaving the company for a rival: Do so and we might sue. But Amazon is only too happy to hire away employees from those same rivals.In recent years, Amazon has poached prominent people from Microsoft, Google, VMware ...www.theinformation.com

Do you think company personalities change when they get big, or are ruthless people the most likely to make big companies?

Are you familiar with the origin of the MacArthur “Genius Grants,” which gives outstanding individuals in their creative fields a million dollars?

The grants are given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Who was John D? He made his first fortune running an insurance company in the 1950s. When widows mailed in their claims he would throw them out and pretend he never received them:

“John MacArthur had come to call because he wanted to develop Graham’s land. But first Cap Graham, making small talk, asked MacArthur to tell him about his start in the insurance business. MacArthur told him that story about the early days when he would open and sort the incoming mail into two piles and throw out the claims pile, figuring he would hear from those people again if their claims were legitimate.”

from The Eccentric Billionaire

My guess is that big companies are more likely to be started and operated by ruthless individuals. You might substitute "single-minded," "focused," or "determined" for "ruthless" in the early days of an organization but at the end of the day Ruthless pretty much rules.

I've worked for both small, privately owned, by extremely rich family, companies (who used to share same jet and vacationing with Bernie Madoff), and multinational large public corporations. Ruthless is a relative term. At the end of the day, the OP refers to loyalty, or at the very least not turning 180 degrees on former employers, just because someone could. I'm, not sure about the suing part, am not a lawyer but am pretty sure it's about some kind of non disclosure previously signed agreements, not necessarily working for the "enemy". Although that too could be subject to employment agreements. So bottom line, corporate world rules our lives, although your feelings may be different or perhaps more isolated from the "phenomena", I'd still ask what else is new?

Of course the attitude changes. The U.S. should apply anti-monopoly laws more often, and should stop treating corporations as people.

The whole idea of capitalist "society" does not work quite right, no matter what they say. Because there's no "we" in it, although fake variants abound. Sadly, the reverse is true, we can't trust our own species to mean well for the masses, when they start smelling the power. But stereotyping and dividing helps no one understand that we actually need much more than that.

The whole idea of creating a corporation is to limit personal liability; the Supreme Court decision giving corporations the "rights" of persons allows entities to have the rights of personhood without the liabilities--Rights without Responsibilities. Makes no sense.