Amazon is growing faster than any big company in the nation

How can Amazon - or any company - fill a second headquarters with 50,000 people?

'Let me show you,” said Thomas Paulson, a Minneapolis investment analyst who has followed Amazon for 17 years, as he pulled up a staffing chart on his iPad. 'Their success has surprised even them.”

Beneath the hype of Amazon's search for a second headquarters are numbers that defy gravity and a business strategy that investors wouldn't tolerate from most companies.

Seattle-based Amazon has expanded from a base as the world's largest online retailer to become a major competitor in several other industries. Its web services business is the largest provider of data warehouses for corporate America.

Its logistics unit is building out airfreight, trucking and shipping lines. And its media business is now one of Hollywood's biggest producers.

All four businesses have reached a size that make Amazon the fastest-growing large company in the United States at the moment - and perhaps ever.

It's leaping from $100 billion to $200 billion in annual sales faster than all but one of the handful of U.S. companies that have accomplished that. Exxon crossed $200 billion instantly when it bought Mobil in 1998.

Amazon is mostly growing organically and could hit $200 billion next year, just three years after reaching $100 billion. Apple did it in five years, Wal-Mart in six and Berkshire Hathaway seven. UnitedHealth Group is on the verge of doing it in six years.

In the process, Amazon is gobbling up people like a maw, adding a net 111,000 to its worldwide staff last year. That's nearly as many people as it employed in 2013.

Amazon started this year with 341,000 people and was expected to add 136,000, not counting the 87,000 who joined in its acquisition of Whole Foods or the 120,000 holiday-season temps.

For Paulson, who started his own investment firm, Inflection Capital Management, this year, Amazon's ability to keep hiring at a fast rate is so important that he checks on the company's top human relations executive, Beth Galetti, every time he visits the Seattle headquarters.

'These are really big (hiring) numbers when you go forward,” Paulson said.

Last month, Amazon announced that it envisions spending $5 billion on a second corporate home that may someday employ 40,000 to 50,000 people. It gave political and development leaders in U.S. and Canadian cities six weeks, until today, to prepare real estate and incentive proposals.

Amazon turned from a fast-growing company to an ultrafast-growing one in 2011, a year when it accelerated the construction of giant distribution centers for its retail business, and its web services business also hit the gas. Its staffing grew 67 percent that year, the fastest since its earliest years when the base was small.

From 2012 through last year, it averaged 44 percent annual growth to its head count - a staggering pace usually seen in much smaller or younger companies.

Amazon declined to comment for this story. In a letter to shareholders early last year, CEO Jeff Bezos ascribed the rapid growth as the payoff from a 'distinctive organizational culture” built around a few principles.

'I'm talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence,” he wrote.

Bezos, a former hedge fund investor, started Amazon in 1995 as a way into the then-nascent world of internet retailing. He first offered books from a small warehouse near the Seattle Kingdome, added music and videos a few years later and rolled into other categories to become an 'everything store.”

Bezos encourages risk and tolerates failure at a level beyond what's seen in most large companies.

'Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right,” he wrote to shareholders last year. 'Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.”