Amazon said it plans to hire another 33,000 U.S. workers in corporate and tech roles at an average salary (including benefits) of $150,000. To help fill the positions, the company will provide 1,000 recruiters and 20,000 career coaching sessions for free to anyone who signs up for its virtual Career Day on Sept. 16.

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• Registration for the career fair is now open. People can sign up for fireside chats, 15-minute career coaching, and hourly warehouse and code review breakout sessions.
• The 33,000 positions are in areas like AWS, Alexa, and Prime Video. Some of the new positions will be at Amazon's HQ2 under construction in Arlington, Virginia, with others in Seattle, Denver, New York, Phoenix, and elsewhere.
• The new hires will work remotely at first. The company plans for staff to return to offices on Jan. 8, 2021.
• The news comes after Amazon last month announced plans to hire 20,000 workers in seven U.S. and U.K. cities for both corporate and non-corporate roles.
• Last year, Amazon hosted 17,000 job seekers at career day events in six U.S. cities. It's hired 175,000 more employees during the pandemic to help fulfill orders and deliveries.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has topped Forbes’ list of wealthiest Americans for a third consecutive year. The Forbes 400 ranking, released yesterday, says Bezos is worth $179 billion, ahead of Bill Gates, who's worth $111 billion. Overall, America’s 400 richest have a net worth of $3.2 trillion, an increase of $240 billion from a year ago.

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• Author MacKenzie Scott, Bezos' ex-wife, came in at No. 13 on the list, with a net worth of $57 billion.
• According to Forbes, Bezos’ fortune (as of late July) is up 57 percent from last year.
• President Trump's ranking fell to No. 352 from 275 after his business, the Trump Organization, suffered losses during the pandemic. His estimated net worth dropped from $3.1 billion to $2.5 billion.

Deep Dive: Amazon's fake reviews

Thousands of fake reviews continue to flood Amazon.com as experts note that reviewers are getting free products in exchange for five-star ratings. Recently, Amazon removed 20,000 reviews after an investigation found that top U.K. reviewers were engaging in fraud. In this special feature, we examine the investigation, as well as a study that confirms companies pay for fake reviews to gain extra sales, at least temporarily...

Amazon says it will continue to fight the Pentagon's decision to award a $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, which the Department of Defense (DoD) reaffirmed last week. Microsoft won the JEDI contract over Amazon in October 2019. This spring, the Pentagon launched a review of the award after Amazon challenged it in a lawsuit, claiming that the government was biased due, in part, to President Trump’s personal dislike of Jeff Bezos and the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post.

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• On Friday, the DoD said its re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud contract still shows that Microsoft represents "the best value to the government."
• Shortly after, Amazon responded in a blog post, claiming that the Pentagon awarded the contract due to "politics and improper influence." Amazon says it will continue to pursue "a fair, objective, and impartial review."
• Microsoft still can't begin work on the project until Amazon's legal challenge works its way through the court system.
• The JEDI – or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure – contract tasks Microsoft with upgrading the DoD's IT infrastructure over the next decade.

Amazon has banned foreign sales of seeds and plants into the U.S. after thousands of people said they receive unsolicited packages of them in the mail. The news came after U.S. authorities raised concerns about the potential threats to U.S. agriculture and local ecosystems from seeds delivered from e-commerce sites. The Department of Agriculture says people shouldn't plant the seeds because they could be non-native and/or invasive species or carry diseases.

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• Most of the packages were postmarked from China. Analyses of the plants show at least 14 species, including rose, mint, and lavender.
• Authorities believe the packages were delivered as part of a "brushing" scam, when sellers deliver low-value items that generate online reviews to raise a seller's legitimacy.
• Amazon recently updated its seller rules to reflect the new policy. It will still allow sale of seeds from U.S.-based sellers.
• As of late July, people in at least 27 states had reported the unsolicited seed deliveries. The Department of Agriculture and other federal and state agencies are investigating.

Amazon was fined $72,000 by the U.K. government after it failed to provide internal documents for a former antitrust probe into Amazon's investment in U.K. food delivery startup Deliveroo. The company was up to two months late submitting the 189 documents, which included emails between Bezos and other executives. The report didn’t divulge what was discussed in the emails.

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• Amazon purchased a 16% stake in Deliveroo last year. Deliveroo announced it had raised $575m in an Amazon-led funding round, though it's unclear how much came from the e-retailer.
• Shortly after, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched the probe over concerns that it could threaten competition in the food delivery sector.
• In August, the CMA gave approval for the stake, saying that it wouldn't lessen competition.
• Amazon says it won't appeal and plans to pay the fine.

QUICK HITS

• "Titans" vet Alan Ritchson will take on the title role for Amazon's "Jack Reacher" series, based on the novels by Lee Child.
• Amazon partnered with AT&T to allow customers to make and receive phone calls on their Alexa devices.
• Project Connected Home over IP, which aims to combine Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance into an open-source smart home platform, is planning a 2021 release.
• Conga tapped into insights from tech-forward business leaders in order to create this fact-packed report: The State of Digital Document Transformation*

*This is sponsored content.